Swifts know how not to die,
swooping between moving vehicles,
and lizards toe-hold my bedroom
ceiling. A man, neither swift nor acrobat,
nose-dived into my friend’s windshield.
In the mirror, I dismember
myself — subway tunnels
and elevators, yellow
cabs and grime, and that bridge
from which my brother dove
outside Chicago. I spar
with a shadow, write like a wild
thing, dripping sweat
with other salty stuff,
like Lot’s wife as she crystallized
into a city still in time, its contours
a ghost of where we once lived
and with whom — a womb,
lounge, bedroom, tunnel,
mirror — a doppelgänger
trickster damning distances
of space and clocks, my brother’s
persistence to stay
airborne — a flutter, a scatting
of nonsense, the cacophony
of childhood between us.
Click here to read Pamela Wax on the origin of the poem.
Image by Basheer Tome on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Pamela Wax:
I began this poem while on an artists’ residency in Costa Rica, for which I had packed several old journals in hopes of finding new inspiration in their pages. Though this poem has gone through many iterations since, it began as a playful experiment in found poetry, in which I strung together a number of images, memories, and phrases I lifted from those journals, and added some new images and experiences I was having in Costa Rica, like the lizard on the ceiling.
My relationship to my brother and his death by suicide appears in many of my poems. The couplets in this poem emphasize that relationship.
Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022), Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and Every Single Beast of My Heart (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems have received three Best of the Net nominations and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. Some of her other publications include Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Pinch, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Nimrod, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Epiphany, and Slippery Elm. An ordained rabbi, Pam lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.
Latest posts by Pamela Wax
(see all)
