Traci Brimhall is an American poet and professor, born 1982. She teaches creative writing at Kansas State University and is the poet laureate of Kansas.
AUBADE AS FUEL
Traci Brimhall
Your lip an abstraction of iris always arousing
the question of the bed. Which goodbye lasts?
Only yesterday my hands rich with dirt. I told you
Milkweed is my new salvation addiction. You know
I always need to save something, to control it.
I can make a pollen island, make your collarbone
a spiritual landscape, the air around us orange
and alive. The shape you left in the sheets
a Rorschach I read as a rattlesnake’s skeleton
in the silverware drawer, no, a fire in a cabin,
no, a cabin on fire, the absence it will make.
But look at me now, my heat signature a whole
bouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke.
It’s O.K. that it’s over. Leaving is a lesson of
pleasure. My ribs, sets of parentheses. My heart,
an aside, an apple ready for the twist. My legs
around your hips, a pillory, our shame public
to the night. Tulip shadows on the nightstand,
an apology marooned and lightless, each bite
mark on your shoulder synonymous with grief.
You ask me to brush the match against the red
phosphorus of Goodbye in a way that makes
you believe it. I ask to be the one on top, the one
struck bright when God pours out the lightning.
===
BETTER TO MARRY THAN TO BURN
Traci Brimhall
Traci Brimhall
a grave, an openness. That’s how we knew
our belonging and how we knew it wouldn’t last.
I was too bloodless, staining our garage with prayers
of anger and broken coffee cups. All love cost us
was fear and a bag of frozen raspberries, sweetened
condensed milk, and a blade. I belonged to him
in the left side of my ribs and in each systole. The homes
we made in each other gave us four waterfalls and bouquets
torn from spring branches, four walls we mortgaged
and dishes shaking their cupboards. We used to walk
the arboretum and subtract the ducklings each week
without any sense of grief. The old celery fields smelled
of cinnamon some days. Others, mint. I would jump
on his back like we were young, nearly innocent,
with laughs as dark as our halos. I wished Always
but the dandelion seeds were stubborn, everything ripe
refused my mouth. When I said Come home, it was a lie,
but I believed it. For a year I was light shaking on
the surface of the water, a fire softening into a flood,
and once his hand around my arm like a snake circling
a branch in Eden. Not all secrets are shames, and this one
isn’t either. It’s the pale green of healing. It’s my lips
opening like parentheses and his name inside, it’s turning
back from the wrong north, the moon like a slice of raw
onion, my skin weeping like a fever, closing the question
with my hand around my other arm so I’ll match, so I’ll burn.
DEAR THANTOS,
Traci Brimhall
Goddamn the sweet ease of night.
Damn the daylight, too. Dream me.
Winter me. Sleep me somewhere numb.
Somewhere God doesn’t summon me
from the side of a man who begs me to dive
the well and bring up the boat. I ate the liver
of a seal and a narwhal’s arctic tongue. I shot
a humpback with a harpoon. It struggled,
but it sang the moral mysteries, moan
edits oral history to the submarines as it fell,
its body a hundred-year feast for the ocean floor,
the testament in its belly gone so wild,
so racked with doubt, not all the fat on
the whale’s back could burn the meaning out.
=====
FLOWER IS WARMER THAN THE AIR AROUND BECAUSE IT WANTS THE BEE
Traci Brimhall
My fingers grow white with winter, blood
stopping at the palms. My whole body goldens
in summer. Even beneath my bathing suit
my breasts glow like marigolds. It was wrong
to lick milk off the counter, but my philosophy
is all instinct, and the only god of my hours is
pleasure. My doctor’s commandments—do not
run, do not crochet, do not play Winter Wind
on the piano. But my joys are sincere and full
of orchids and laps around the track. I want to
abstain from nothing, not the dance parties,
not the red velvet cupcakes, not the prairie
hikes with insects flicking from stem to stem.
I know the curves of my hip sockets from the way
they ache with morning, but when desire comes
with its shafts of sunlight and efficient tongues,
I let my body be lightning—so bright the pain lives
somewhere else while I sizzle like a cobra lily.
I have been a spectacle on the kitchen counter,
and a cowgirl alone in a cave of winter blankets,
the nerves in my fingers burning white but warming.
=====
FROM THE BOOK OF UNSIGNED CONFESSIONS
Traci Brimhall
Morning glories confess to dawn, which
confesses its pinkness to prairie grasses
that need a western wind to finish
confessing their seeds to the late
season. Just as the ladder confesses
to the barn, which creaks its admissions
back, the cottonmouth confesses to
the cottonwood, whose confession is
outshouted by lightning. The barbed wire
resists, holds all its secrets and horses
in the meadow. Bees confess by dancing.
Wine confesses to the bottle, wetly
and often. A lullaby confesses to a ghost,
who confesses to the kitchen cupboard.
The lights blink on and off—on, off—
confessing its loneliness to the house,
which answers, like a lover, with silence.
=====
LOVE IS
Traci Brimhall
a patient, perhaps, wearing its gown,
gripping its belly and complaining
about its clumsy health, asking for its
histories to be kissed away. Love is kind
of excited to have a body sometimes,
with its delicious weaknesses—shivers,
tiredness, the tastebuds for macchiatos
and Oreos. Love is a spring storm coming
to weep its petty joys all over the bees
humming in the graveyard. Love is a nest
of moonlight, by which I mean nothing
real but still beautiful, seductive as any
good image. I feel sad about love as I rub
my own feet in the waiting room, but maybe
tomorrow it will churn through the cumulus
noon, lightning promising a flood of flames,
grass offering obedience to the fire. If it is
coming, I can be patient as a rose of Jericho.
Even with morning’s slow rain apologizing
to the garden, love is a head on my chest,
a steady breathing. It is a museum of shared
sleeps. It is a body’s quick amnesia, the pain
barely a memory after the pill. It glows like
a hospital gown dipped in luminol. Love
waits like the hand in your hand reaching
towards the sound of your name.
====
OUR BODIES BREAK LIGHT
Traci Brimhall
We crawl through the tall grass and idle light,
our chests against the earth so we can hear the river
underground. Our backs carry rotting wood and books
that hold no stories of damnation or miracles.
One day as we listen for water, we find a beekeeper—
one eye pearled by a cataract, the other cut out by his own hand
so he might know both types of blindness. When we stand
in front of him, he says we are prisms breaking light into color—
our right shoulders red, our left hips a wavering indigo.
His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits
on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies
of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,
says the graveyard is full of dead prophets. To you, he presents
his arms, tattooed with songs slave catchers whistle
as they unleash the dogs. He lets you see the burns on his chest
from the time he set fire to boats and pushed them out to sea.
You ask why no one believes in madness anymore,
and he tells you stars need a darkness to see themselves by.
When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt?
and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm.
====
SAUDADE
Traci Brimhall
Each time I start, the explorers and tyrants,
encantados and daughters are already dead. If you want
to know what I long for, I’d say a world of my own
making where changing destinies is a phrase away,
where everything is true but retreats when you try
and touch it. Where saintless miracles frequent
because the awe is boundless and the drink specials
are cheap. Where I am capable of a quieter greatness
and can write the story I wish someone had written
for me. If only the past would have me now that I have
its answers—its griefs and inheritances. I’ve given
at least half of my faith to madness, the rest
to the chapters written for those who were made
for more loneliness. Not this present with its
half-hearted daydreams and migrating graves.
You can grieve something you’ve never seen.
The past seems more sure, more endless. Time
moves, but I won’t. I will wait for the what-was
to return, the way it did once, that morning
I found a naked girl in my field, her body sure
as prose. When I reached, her flesh vanished,
her bones lay white as paper. My hand, all urge
and no sentiment, bled into her ribs, joyful,
beholding, waiting for the word to begin.