A New Vocabulary
/Rose DeMaris
Remember the old-time confidence of sons and daughters all chlorinated
in the summer dusk, under reliable stars, with popsicle-tinted tongues
uncurling, emboldened by sunburn, who steered themselves down steep
porch steps, flung their own bodies from bikes, screamed Daddy! Daddy!
for the pleasure of knowing Daddy — giant, beer-scented, sane — would
come, would carry them from the concrete, would repair. In the beginning
the word was a drug with which we hit ourselves again and again. Bruised,
we now wait for a new vocabulary. It is summer year round. Houses burn.
We admit he was never willing to run down the stairs for all of us. 1 in 4
birds have vacated the sky. From their cages, children listen to the elegies
of those who still sing, who carry poison worms to nestlings. We lie, having
lost our balance, with a bicycle on top of our body, with its bright chrome
handlebar against our throat, tangled streamers reddening, whitening, bluing
our mouth. In the silence, she opens her front door, that neighborhood lady
we never notice. She lifts us onto her bathroom counter, beside the orchids.
Water from her tap tastes rooty, like Earth pulling everything back to herself.
She tints our cuts with iodine, causes the staining that precedes the healing
of wounds, this woman we will go back to not seeing, the one
who comes when we are too choked
to call for help.
Author’s note: I wrote this poem right after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I was also thinking about the murder of George Floyd, the pandemic, the detention of immigrants, the tendency toward nostalgia for our country’s romanticized, patriarchal, and in many ways problematic past, our climate and environmental crises, lost species, racism, discrimination, and femininity in all its manifestations, plus certain bicycle-related mishaps of my youth and an actual neighborhood lady who once picked me up off the street, as well as my own longings and some keenly-felt absences too personal to note, all topped by a sort of cherry of hope—the halved, glossy, almost fluorescent kind you find in a very American can of fruit cocktail.
Rose DeMaris writes poems, novels, and essays. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Random House, The Millions, and Big Sky Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Fourth River, Cold Mountain Review, Asymptote, and Pine Row Press, and she was a finalist for the 2020 Orison Anthology Award in Poetry. She is currently earning her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University. rosedemaris.com
Read our interview with Rose DeMaris here.
