poetry

Little Kid Yellow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Two summers back, I bought a gallon of paint for $10. At the local hardware store, the clerk had inadvertently mixed the wrong color and offered it to me. What a score, I thought. The color approximated the hue I once used to paint windows in a cupola — a color I christened Little Kid Yellow.

Not everyone in my household has been an enormous fan of painting our front steps bright yellow. Afterwards, even I wondered, Why do I do these things?

Likely, because of January. Because of November, too, and December, and February. Heck, March and April. By the end of May, tiny blue squill will sprinkle the greening-up grass.

But right now, color in northern Vermont is hard to come up. And the little bits of brightness — that’s gold.

The winter wind
flings pebbles
at the temple bell

— Buson

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Jan Thaw

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Rain pours. My daughters return, full of excitement of the ocean, of staying in a city, of a friend, and — for my younger daughter — driving around with my brother, stepping into his cool life.

They have brought me a wooden box of green tea and a tin of red goji berry tea.

Time seems suspended in the endlessness of January, but it’s not: the rain will slick to a landscape of ice, the days are already lengthening.

Again, from poet Kim Stafford:

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Wild Honey, Tough Salt

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Sunday afternoon found my family unexpectedly at a memorial service at the high school, standing in the cold and snow around a bonfire. That evening, my daughter sits  on the couch beside me, reading Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice.” Why, she asks, is she required to memorize poems and recite them aloud?

Because poetry is who we are, both the beauty, the sheer ugliness at times, and the unexplained complexity of life. Here’s a poem by Kim Stafford:

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Holiday Chat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Perhaps in no little part due to my hammered-up lower jaw, I let the holidays simply unroll (albeit with some effort before).

Here’s a scruffy shot of my brother cooking Christmas dinner, while I shiver, and we talk about Marx’s assertion that people make their own history but not in self-selected circumstances, family camping trips and the collapse of the American Empire.

Afterwards, he hung up his beer cans on the line with clothespins. That’s some quality family time.

Winter solitude —
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

— Basho

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Under the Dentist’s Knife

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

As I’m finishing a book about, essentially, pain, maybe it’s fitting that I undergo my own particular pain experience.

In the oral surgeon’s chair, as he came at my face with a small, extremely sharp blade, he paused for a moment and said I was welcome to watch, but I likely wanted to close my eyes. I definitely closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to open my eyes. Almost immediately, my mouth was suffused with salty, rich blood: the taste of the sea and the earth.

While allowing my mouth and those stitches time to repair, I read Chanel Miller’s  gorgeous book — this young woman known as Emily Doe, who was assaulted on the Stanford campus. Her book is filled with food — chocolate and pork dumplings — and begonias, with love of rain falling on skin and a young woman’s excitement about living in a city, but also filled with bodily pain and the complexity of living in a female body in America.

Of all the books I read this year, this author is likely my most favorite, this young woman who took this unasked-for experience, endured, and turned it into strength for so many other women.

Her victim impact statement that initiated the book can be read here.

I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm… Stay tender with your power.

—Chanel Miller, Know My Name

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