Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

In Childhood

104 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century from The Artist’s Daughter In Childhood things don’t die or remain damaged but return: stumps grow back hands, a head reconnects to a neck, a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic. Later this vision is not True: the grandmother remains dead not hibernating in a wolf’s belly. Or the blue parakeet does not return from the little grave in the fern garden though one may wake in the morning thinking mother’s call is the bird. Or maybe the bird is with grandmother inside light. Or grandmother was the bird and is now the dog gnawing on the chair leg. Where do the gone things go when the child is old enough to walk herself to school, her playmates already pumping so high the swing hiccups? Like Lavrinia Like Lavrinia Merli, in 1890 in Majola, Mantua, expired from hysteria and placed in a vault on Thursday, July 3rd, where she regained consciousness, tore at the graves clothes her peasant husband has just smoothed around her seven-month pregnant belly, and where she turned over and gave birth ...