Shelley Puhak

Like the elegy, the epistolary straddles public and private worlds, so it seemed natural to combine the two forms to examine the institutionalized magical thinking we all engage in after a loss.

 

In my grief, I was struck by the way hindsight makes patterns out of the most insignificant, how the mind struggles for a way to organize and order experience. While the loss of a newborn is (thankfully) rare today, this loss was so sadly commonplace for our ancestors that an extensive corresponding mythology and folklore developed. This poem is true to that mythology, bargaining not with an expansive, airy spirit, but with its opposite, a diminutive spirit of the underground.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

<BACK | TOC | NEXT>

 

Letter to the Gnome Who Stole My Firstborn

 

Can I bring you a better bird,
perhaps a talking hawk?
A golden stew-pot? Might we still
negotiate?

My dear rumpled-sheets,
house-on-stilts, donkey-skin:
I would have written sooner,
had I the flour and fat

to make the words. Yesterday
it rained the primordial
roux, the A C G U proteins,
base of the mother sauce,

two consonants, two vowels—
tin and gut, metal
and mineral in the volcanic
vent of mouth. Yesterday

we met at that dressing room
entrance. I was seeking
a shirt for his funeral and you
were smirking at my deflated

belly: you’re pregnant!
You caught me with a handful
of maternity shirts
struggling to find something

that would fit: no, not
pregnant. What is the name
for what I am now—full
of the vast gaps

between the smallest
spaces, the pinky’s width
between two slabs
of granite meeting up

at the sea? Remember
how we met
at that animal sanctuary, among
caged rabbits, kenneled dogs?

You were minding falcons,
dwarfed by their tall
netted towers. My offering—
a fledgling, found half-hairless

and fly-swarmed.
Yet it lived.
My dear rock-spawn, rootresident,
underground-ether—

did you want more
than an ordinary starling?

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Shelley Puhak is the author of Stalin in Aruba, winner of the 2010 Towson Prize for Poetry and the chapbook The Consolation of Fairy Tales, winner of the 2011 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Missouri Review.