TRACI BRIMHALL
Kything Lord, there is nothing special about you, unless bluestem is, unless the seet, seet of the yellow warbler is a disobedient prayer you always honor, unless the crows hunched on the fencepost like a common row of puritans hadn’t commanded me to dig a grave with my hands like an animal and lay in it, a guest. Too much. Too much breath. Nothing here is special unless a grasshopper graces it, unless the way cicadas bruise the silence is dear to those who hear it. The danger here is wind and the way last year’s grasses give themselves too easily to the driptorch. Lord, I still grieve the daughter I didn’t want. Her blood burned on the bathroom floor, her new skyless life among root-lace. Pin of her heart stitched into the living field, the bluest stone. There is nothing special about her unless grief is special to those who carry it. My God, who knows what it is to lose a child, I laid in the ground as if I’d made a burrow and not a burial, as if all sleeps were hibernations, as if all this weeping was waiting for the new season to brighten the ground around me with snow. 54 | Raleigh Review
