Every Atom

Erin Coughlin Hollowell

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781597097208
• eBook ISBN: 9781597099165
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Across distance, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the way her mother's loss of memory changes the narrative between them. By interrogating the past, fissures in language, and the vagaries of identity, the speaker comes to a recognition that we are all more alike in our humanity than we are different.

iv

Cycles have ferried my cradle

First day
of school,
the mothers
walked behind
us wearing wind-
breakers and flat
shoes, their arms
crossed.
I don’t know
what they
talked about. My
mother walked
a little behind them
and did not
talk. The sidewalk
stretched ahead
of us but I
could feel
them talking,
feel my mother
not talking.
The scratching
twitch of her
silence. Whatever
bound me
to her bucked
under tension
and finally
snapped.

The faster
I walked,
the smaller
she became.

Thirty years
later, she lives
in my throat,
leather-soled
and gray
sky faced.
Cough
and cough,
but I cannot
budge her.
Still the silence
of her folded
arms. This silence
become my own
baffling rage
lodged whole.

Something struggles
to be freed.
Something fierce
and parched
and swelling.

Seasons pursuing each other

Autumn morning ghost moon
like a clichéd currach indeed,
but no less alchemical. Frost
in all the footsteps and hollow

places. A few black flies bumble
against the sun-warmed clapboard
looking for a crevice to spend
the winter. Yes, it’s coming.

And for all of us. When
I look in the mirror, straight
back from my temples, paths
of light twist in my hair.

Three cords of hardwood
stacked and seasoned await
their ashes. The cold air tastes
of smoke, that black bitterness

so latched to absence. But not
yet, a few frivolous pansies
still bloom, gaudy and, for now,
invincible.

I also say it is good to fall

Every day, so much effort.

Glass

is neither liquid nor solid. Structure
being the boundary.

A human face

is neither liquid nor solid. A human face
is a culmination of beautiful scars left

by a collection of stories. Every

day, I must decide

which stories

to believe, which to offer up to the world.

Outside the window, the wind pulls on the trees
silently. Or at least from inside I can

not

hear whatever the wind is saying, lies
or that simple kind of truth that moves.
Every day,

lifting the sky on my back,

pushing down the dirt with my feet,
I am the trees leaning this way

then that.

Or perhaps I am a single leaf, holding
on but turning yellow

with one small spot

of brown.

Depressions and exaltations

It means sacrificing
something soft,
twenty lymph nodes,

for the pliant
fiction that every
day is another door

to open. It means
wishing on birds,
on gravity, on clouds,

on the stone
I carry
in my pocket, stone

the size of an infant’s
heart. Far off, a girl
is calling

to her dog,
her laughter spins
like falling leaves.

Wood smoke
twines in my hair
and leather gloves

by the splitting maul.
Even when I forget
calendar pages,

I feel the earth cant.
It means putting away
the porch furniture

and standing
in our dwindling
portion of sun.

Hankering, gross, mystical, nude

Dear Walt,

I see you around town, your scraggly white beard and ragged jacket. Leaning your bicycle in front of the post office. Camped out in the library, sleeping beside a pile of books. I can’t begin to imagine what your life means to you, but I want to. Put a sandwich in your pocket. Put soap in your shower. Put a hat on your rain-wrung head. Age seems to be shaking its fist at me these days. I’ve just started to carry that black backpack of years, and damn if I can bear to put even one year down. My mother now a ransacked house, every window broken, and what she once knew she knew is gone. At night, I think of that soft-focus where faces were hung. And to be honest, Walt, I am afraid. Fear sharpens my pencil and sends me into the dark to check out every sound. I am hoping to find you there, hidden in the woods, your pale knees sunk into the leaf-litter. Oh sure, I know what you’ll say, effusing your flesh in eddies, your mouth stretched open with its habitual yawp, hallelujah for these moments churning up the mud, hallelujah for the waysides and women and men with their scarred faces, hallelujah for twigs and flesh. But what about the hornet’s nest, just revealed, hanging like a wad of bad news next to the path where I’ve walked all summer? What about this wind which begins to slice us with its shriven grimace? Maybe it’s better to put a sweater on, better to gather blankets and tea. Hold our lovers close while we can still remember their names.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach

The day will come when	you forget even this:
your breath unbroken	passing in and out
of your body. You will	forget that you loved
the color b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• i
• ii
• iii
• iv