Chorus Attempting to Interpret Unearthed Fragments of Their Play by Carolina Ebeid
Can you let go the concern
for how it began what happened
Here the word house remains
A reddening ( ) near house
To describe the sounds
coming in A human voice
barks through the window
the same voice like horsehair
stretched along the bow drawn
across the strings
Where the action is missing
we place ( ) A girl pours out
water from a pail flung up
so that the water arches
into a sickle in an instant
of daylight
The word swallows as a complaint
of swallows raiding the air
suddenly thick with gnats
When you notice the ash
you will mutter ash
& it will appear again: ash
on everything, behind the ears ash
Maybe this shadow belongs
to the house at 4:30
Shadow is a length of gauze
loosened over the garden
It began with blizzards
for nine hours
A cleft on the ceiling
or a cleft in the chest
No matter, a cleft let
the weather in
Here is a description
of a face in anger
a weather of arrows
Instead of counting sheep
the injured man folds clothes
in his head into heaps
Separate what is missing
from what’s disappeared
(here has been eaten by silverfish)
We are left to think of ( )
as the space between falling
asleep & waking up
Swallow can be a passage
the gullet, throat,
a grave in the ground
We’re surrounded by swallows
that open ( ) so fluent with bodies
nobodies
Here there was a story
& we were part of the after-
waves in a disaster
braiding wreaths of roadside flowers
The violet ones we’ll call purple daughters
The white ones: asylum lights
© 2019 Carolina Ebeid. Today’s poem originally appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Poetry Magazine.
Ebeid earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and is pursuing her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. She currently lives in Colorado where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She also serves as poetry editor at The Rumpus and edits (with her husband, Jeffrey Pethybridge) Visible Binary, an online journal specializing in experimental poetics and avant-garde expression. She has been published in numerous journals both in print and online and has been awarded multiple fellowships, among them fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
She is the author of the poetry collection You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior, which was published in 2016 by Noemi Press and is available to purchase through Small Press Distribution.
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