America Talks to Me Like a Mother by Catie Rosemurgy

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 27, 2016   America Talks to Me Like a Mother   Catie Rosemurgy

Don’t worry. One kills in dreams but wakes having not killed.   Having not killed is part of waking. Some mornings, though, you lay there pinned under layers of light, fear,   and woolen blankets. You know what’s right and what’s wrong, what you don’t know is what happened and if you were actually there.   That’s why dreams of digging a deep hole with a stolen shovel are so confusing. That’s why you expect to jerk awake when you stand in a pile of dry brush holding a lit match in your hand.   The best thing to do, always, is get up and walk down the stairs. Don’t leave. Not yet.   Wait awhile in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter whose kitchen, and let the house absorb the blame. That’s what a house is for.   You aren’t screaming, you’re insisting because you’re always wrong, even while you sit on the ground before daybreak waiting for enough light to gather sticks. You don’t know yet what a stick is. You can’t be expected to remember anything once you’ve seen the sun rise.   All day long, you walk back and forth through the field, standing guard over what didn’t happen to keep it from mixing with what did. You didn’t shoot the gun, you just listened well when people talked about how to do it. You didn’t walk unscathed through the fire, you walked unscathed over it. You happened to find a narrow bridge.   You wouldn’t purposely hurt anyone, but keep describing all the ways that you would. List all the things that never happened, and see if you can suck clean the edges of what did.            Copyright © 2016 Catie Rosemurgy. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “‘America Talks to Me Like a Mother’ is from a series of poems about American hometowns in general and more specifically about a fictional version of the town that I think of as my home. Here I imagine myself being directly involved in local history and living through the 1871 forest fire that devastated a large swath of the upper Midwest. Of course I imagine myself living. For those of us who are descendants of colonizers, what a broken and dangerous relationship we have to place, landscape, history, home, sleep, and waking.” —Catie Rosemurgy   Catie Rosemurgy is the author of The Stranger Manual (Graywolf Press, 2010.) She teaches at The College of New Jersey and lives in Philadelphia.     Poetry by Rosemurgy   The Stranger Manual (Graywolf Press, 2010)   "October (section I)" by Louise Glück "Myself I Sing" by George Oppen "Poet’s Work" by Lorine Niedecker 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