THE SCENE/art&words
Art&words
art by MEGAN PERKINS Megan Perkins uses her brush to capture the spirit of Spokane places and events, exploring her hometown with paint and love. Follow her adventures on Instagram @artistseyeonspokane, Facebook, and meganperkinsart.com.
passing through birds by DANIELLE WEEKS On the phone, my mother tells me her mother died in the night—night as a place, a private dark room that my sleepless mother couldn’t leave for hours. She calls me three time zones away. My morning has just invited the hummingbirds’ buzz, the jays’ harsh kyrie. Have mercy on us for what we need in this hour, whether we stay through the winter or follow the day to its vanishing. We call dying passing for a reason. My grandmother prepared her funeral arrangements, pressed a set of clean clothes, and later the lamp-eyed creatures stilled as something passed through the air like an owl in flight. My mother and I sometimes talk in birds: sharing how early the robins brave spring, curling their thin toes around ice-sleeved branches. How can they bear it? Or we talk about the year a wild turkey landed on her roof, stood sentinel, worried the late spring with her call. Time to give something of herself away to life, to the long line. A mother looks after others before herself. I ask my mother what she will do for herself today, in this pause between seasons, before the funeral and cleaning the old house, shelves of yellowed paper and dust. She says she might sleep through the morning, late enough for the day to warm. There, the cardinals have come, wearing the bright red my grandmother loved. She might spend time watching them feed, curling her toes into the earth as it turns and turns. Danielle Weeks received her MFA in poetry through Eastern Washington University’s creative writing program. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Boiler Journal, Cimarron Review, The Gettysburg Review, Redivider, and Salt Hill, among others. 40
BOZZIMEDIA.com / FEBRUARY 2022