TRACI BRIMHALL on
Ellen Bass I Could Touch It When my wife was breaking apart, my son was falling in love. She lay on the couch with a heated sack of rice on her belly, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out the window at the olive tree as it broke into tiny white blossoms, as it swelled into bitter black fruit. At first, I wanted to spare him. I wished he was still farming up north, tucking bulbs of green onions into their beds and watering the lettuce, his hands gritty, his head haloed in a straw hat. But as the months deepened, I grew selfish. I wanted him here with his new love. When I passed the open bathroom door, I wanted to see them brushing their teeth, one perched on the toilet lid, one on the side of the tub, laughing and talking through their foamy mouths, toothbrushes rattling against their teeth. Like sage gives its scent when you crush it. Like stone is hard. They were happy and I could touch it. |
Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected by Michelle Boisseau for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, was published by SeedStar Books in March 2017.
Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Orion The Believer, The Nation, The New Republic and New York Times Magazine. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Brevity. Some of her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She has also received the Just Desserts Short Fiction Prize from Passages North (selected by Roxane Gay), the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction from Bellingham Review (selected by Sue William Silverman), the Jane Geske Award for poetry from Prairie Schooner (selected by Kwame Dawes), the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Sally Wen Mao), and a Pushcart Prize. |