Meditative Weekend of Poetry: Emily Paige Wilson
My mom’s sister died of a disease she could have prevented. Grief is soft like silt, but we don’t talk about it.
Death was such a sensory experience: spittle that smelled of sage; skin that sagged like a translator’s second speech.
We don’t talk about it. Only crickets attended the funeral, shedding their papier-mâché socks. We sweep, but don’t talk about it.
My mom cradles the black crow of her guilt under her damp armpit, but we don’t talk about it.
I want to know more about the ghost: how blue her face; which room she haunts the longest; is her dress
made of willow or lace? But I don’t ask about it. It’s only ever autumn these days: mums blooming
from the cupboards, the way the rain tastes sour and thin like apple skins. I know my mom
should release the crow outside before it makes a nest of our throw pillows, but we don’t talk about the feathers
out loud or to each other. Glass feels like a trap now. Every reflection a test: in a family of three,
which women are we? My mom must want to carve messages in this mess of granite
countertops and casseroles. You could’ve been a much better daughter to me, Emily, but we don’t talk.
(”It’s Only Ever Autumn” from Rust+Moth, Winter 2018)
(Suggestions: I couldn’t get away from the ‘s’ sound and how it permeated the poem. How “sister” incarnates it at the beginning and instantiates it fully into the poem by providing the guiding image of “grief” as a tactic to recognize the importance of its reoccurrence. (which in the next line is “soft like silt”). I find it illuminating to see the ‘s’ sound in this poem as the reemergence of grief in varied forms. I like to follow it. So where it starts with softness and sister, how it “is her dress” and “tastes sour” and “makes a nest”. Not so much the imagery but how the visceral sense of sound allows you to feel it inside of you as travel through the poem (especially if you read it aloud).
