Editors' Picks, Week 1

Chairs

by Liz Ahl

My mother’s house has too many chairs.

I still take the pause of the initiate
when I say “my mother’s house.”

For how many more months or years
will I pause or stutter before saying,
“my mother’s house,” as if I am practicing
a new language, which of course I am?

Unlike her, I’m not immersed
in the country of that language

– the house – their house – her house –

though for her, even living there,
in the daily navigation of a geography of loss,
a steep learning curve, the receptors
for new language acquisition
burned out decades ago.

For both of us, then, still dreaming
in the mother-tongue—
the language where my father,
who designed this house, has not died.
We stumble back and forth long-distance
across translation’s porous membrane,
awkward, tender, misunderstanding, lonely.

At least I’ve got the certainty
the house was never mine—
designed by dad and built
long after I’d spun into my own life—
a welcome place to visit, but
I’d never claimed it, never had
my bedroom painted with my particular
childhood, though some furniture,
certain lamps and paintings, certain chairs,
kept through many homes, many moves,
still project a soft aura of kinship,
an enclosing our of memory.

His recliner is still angled towards hers,
hers towards his, casting blueprint lines
towards an invisible spot out there,
where they eventually intersect,
just on the other side of the picture window
which frames exquisitely the lacquered peaks
and the deep, flat fjord.

In the basement (his, always, still)
of that house (hers),
still perched atop a dusty rattan shelf,
is the perfect scale model of the house
he rendered precisely in white foam-core
complete with cut-out windows,
so he could hold it aloft to understand
how the light would fall into each room.

From the Grass

by Nora Kirkham

We are on the train home from Aberdeen:
the hills are beginning to spring. You trail gorse
along a smudged window and spot deer,
a whole family of them, folded in a field.
Unfolding before your eyes, you thought
they were hares or birds. I wondered
how many creatures we had passed, how many
lived and died by us without ever knowing
they were seen, and if this matters, anyway.
In June I was in Salisbury, on a bus cresting
up a hill. Beyond the cathedral, a gold-leaf
glow spilled from glass windows and
I saw antlers flying, or maybe I dreamed.
From that bus window, I held on
to three light seconds of hooves lifting,
to the twisting of clover roots and soil
spreading only a millimeter further than
where it had been before.
Perhaps none of this mattered,
but I did not want to arrive at the next stop,
I wanted to turn back, I did not want to go
home. Some might call this haunting, how
these hidden lives breathe their way
up through new strands of grass—
they pass through us all the time. Sometimes,
from a window, we find them,
then forgetting is what makes them fly.