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09-11-2019
Sara Henning
FIRST MURMURATION
When I say a son
broken open by his father
is becoming a starling,
I mean feathers are unfurling
from his skin, and confused
as he is by his wrists
uncoiling, by his thumbs
angling into a dirt
-flushed twosome of bastard
alulae, he imagines
he’s only a boy
unhitching the day
from his shoulders,
boy rushing through a whole
fruit orchard of minor
grievances, the sun
-bruised flesh of the fallen
scenting the backs
of his knees. When I say
a son broken open
by his father, I mean
a son, not a sweat-split Eden
where no only means
he’s rising through fog,
not a sheen of danger,
a canopy of trees
silking the soles of his
pollen-luscious feet.
When I say a son broken
open, I mean
a son shape-shifting
past the velvet scrim
of orchard and ether,
a son who learns
to leave his body
at the first slow pierce
of his father’s song.
FOR MY UNCLE, WHO LEARNED TO FLY
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October
—James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
On nights moths cyclone and plunge
into my car’s low beams, I’m convinced
they are bodies in love—forewings ricochet
against parabolic reflectors
in cadence, thoraxes pelt the cool
tease of glass. Because spring thaw
suffers them into the crosswind’s whirl,
the dirge of the suicidally beautiful
becomes a rousing bell. When I learn
that celestial routing plots their spiral
flight paths, not longing, that my light’s heady
ploy is another logic
betraying me, I think of my uncle,
knees down in wildflowers, the day
my mother broke his arm. I imagine the clash
over a blue ukulele,
his ulna split by its cheap wood,
the way the nylon strings feathered
his skin. I want to touch his cast’s exhausted
foxhole as he secrets
his pain inside of it, to arch
into its raw cotton. I want to close
my eyes over nights their father forced them
into the cellar, spurred him
onto his sister with joint locks
and vital point strikes to teach her
a lesson, his body thrust forward by their
father’s slurs. Years later,
grinding his thighs into boot
-marked bleachers at the rodeo, my uncle
watches cowboys launch toward steer bolting
from spring-loaded chutes,
watches for hands full of horns,
man given over to adrenaline and dust.
He gazes as man seizes beast like a child
held between another
child’s hands. Before my uncle
leaves for boot camp, he’ll hold his sister’s
wrist until she vines her fingers around his thumb
sequined with nicotine
stains. It is the last time
his hands will plot her vein’s smooth
tributaries, trail the map of scars to her pulse.
Next autumn, a bullet
will sing its way into his skin.
But for now, like honeysuckle
twisting hard at the root it loves or betrays,
she won’t let go.
OTHER PLANETS, OTHER STARS
At the shooting range, my mother and aunt
single out pistols, set aside an hour to palm
the grip of unversed steel, trigger guard,
every barrel’s delicately latticed gorge.
And after, they inundate targets at their chakra points,
first head, then heart. Flare after flare
penetrating paper. Astronomers say that only one in five
stars like the sun hosts an earth-sized world,
but I can’t stop thinking of the smaller planets,
gaunt and mysterious, little martyrs of rock
accelerating in circuit, wondering what’s to come.
I’m quarantined in the lobby, a pair of muffs
sheathing my ears. I’m not old enough to fear
men who swagger through unlocked doors, to slip
a hand under the bed skirt night after night
like my mother every time our house moans
under a broken stud, discerning metal from ruche.
Not every world has the girth to sashay
against gravity, so it hoards what it can. Planets
pulverized to radiant dust become girls of panic
and stone. I watch through bulletproof glass
how my mother now mimes the length
of the pull, metal jacketing the bullet’s scorching interior.
I want to be a planet far from this
sisterhood of Kepler data, where silhouettes
of men exert strong centrifugal force. I want
to be a soft glint of rock heralding her own
inertia, body without magnetic field
distorted by another celestial urging—aim the muzzle
like a solar tsunami. Detonate or run.
-From View from True North, Southern Illinois University Press, 2018.
Bio: SARA HENNING is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. It has been short listed by Jacar Press for the 2018 Julie Suk Award and for the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Henning teaches writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she also serves as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Please visit her at her electronic home: https://www.sarahenningpoet.com.
