The Cry by Paisley Rekdal

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 12, 2016   The Cry   Paisley Rekdal

A man can cry, all night, your back shaking against me as your mother sleeps, hooked to the drip to clear her kidneys from their muck of sleeping pills. Each one white as the snapper’s belly I once watched a man gut by the ice bins in his truck, its last  bubbling grunt cleaved in two with a knife. The way my uncle’s rabbit growled in its cage, screamed so like a child that when I woke the night a fox chewed through the wires to reach it, I thought it was my own voice frozen in the yard. And then the fox, trapped later by a neighbor, who thrashed and barked, as did the crows that came for its eyes: the sound of one animal’s pain setting off a chain in so many others, until each cry dissolves into the next grown louder.  Even if I were blind I would know night by the noise it made: our groaning bed, the mewling staircase, drapes that scrape against glass panes behind which stars rise, blue and silent. But not even the stars are silent: their pale waves echo through space, the way my father’s disappointment sags at my cheek, and his brother’s anger whitens his temple. And these are your mother’s shoulders shaking in my arms tonight, her thin breath that drags at our window where coyotes cry: one calling to the next calling to the next, their tender throats tipped back to the sky.            Copyright © 2016 by Paisley Rekdal. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “‘The Cry’ is a poem I wrote for my husband after a year of family crises we were both experiencing and trying to weather together. It came fairly quickly, as one image really did unfold into the next for me.” —Paisley Rekdal   Paisley Rekdal is the author of Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). She teaches at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City. Poetry by Rekdal   Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) "Maelstrom: One Drop Makes the Whole World Kin" by Anne Waldman "Business" by Naomi Shihab Nye "Thing" by Rae Armantrout Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038