After the Reading: Ilya Kaminsky & Katie Ferris

what I might have said to you after an event if I had words left to speak to my feelings beyond 8:00 PM

Kaminsky & Ferris reading promo, UA Poetry Center

Last Thursday was a day.

It was three days into the presidential transition, and toxic gas came burping out of all of the expected locations; but they came all at once, which I somehow hadn’t expected. Good morning, Sara. Do you know someone in an abusive relationship? Is said abuser emboldened, at the moment? Check. Are you, or is someone you know, grappling with chronic PTSD? Will they be triggered today? Check. Do you feel a white guilt you haven’t been taught how to hold still enough to analyze? Check. How about just feeling a debilitating hopelessness for a moment, somewhere near your sternum, re: the amount of suffering in the world — can you hold onto that while you drink your morning coffee, please? Check! And how are your best friends? Going through a divorce? In a deep depression? Cleaning up vomit and shit for the second time in a month? Check, check, check.

When these bubbles of awful come full speed, the only answer is that there is no answer, but that there is, also, poetry. Luckily, Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Ferris were sharing their poems with us at the Poetry Center that night.

As Kaminsky began to read, Billie played Zelda next to me and worried a bit about the sad poems she could hear through her child-friendly headphones. I tried to explain to her, afterward, that the “sad” poems were also full of wonder, and that they made me feel human. I do not feel ready to introduce her to the full gambit of “human” — to “In a Time of Peace,” for instance:

We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
to buy shampoo,
pick up the children from school,
get basil.

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch. 

Our children are so full of generous love and zeal for acting toward what’s fair and right; they have an instinct to protect one another. I watch others watch.

Kaminsky’s long lines force us to watch a little longer, a little harder. I am thankful for that.

I also feel unprepared to explain to my daughter how delicate the human body is, even though she knows this already, has seen our delicacy dismantle itself (“I am afraid of dying because I don’t want to be buried under sand [like her beloved uncle]”). But Ferris urges me to consider how I have always been preparing myself for this explanation, because I have been trying to explain it to myself these many years, too. In, “In the Event of My Death,” Ferris writes:

...promise you will find my heavy braid
and bury it—

I will need a rope
to let me down into the earth.
I’ve hidden others
strategically around the globe, a net
to catch my body
in its weaving.

Via words and dead skin cells and shed hair and screams relayed through cell phone tours and many hours crying in different shower cubicles with grief— kinds of ropes— I, too, have been preparing a net to catch me when I go. This is what I’m trying to urge on my daughter when I force her to look into the darkness at night, when I give her the palo sante stick to smell, when I hug her as tight as she asks me to.

After the reading, while Billie was watching Luca with a teenage friend she looks longingly up to, I got to dance a little bit— really, and weirdly, dance— in the corner of the event space, with some dear friends, by where the books were selling like… what sells anymore? That $10 thing you don’t need from Amazon?

It felt unabashedly good to move our limbs like gumby after listening to these lines together.

that’s it,

Sara