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Red Hen Press - Anna V.Q. Ross

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73 pages

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In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the daily routines of carpools, math homework, and bedtime stories are interrupted by memories of abuse and reports of school shootings and environmental collapse. But at heart, these are poems of reclamation, reminding us that “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it.” Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.

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Publié par	Red Hen Press
Date de parution	08 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781636280868
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Flutter, Kick
Copyright © 2022 by Anna V. Q. Ross
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book Layout by Margot Heron
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ross, Anna (Anna V. Q.), author.
Title: Flutter, kick : poems / Anna V. Q. Ross.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022007376 | ISBN 9781636280455 (paperback) | ISBN 9781636280868 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3568.O841986 F59 2022 | DDC 811/.54—dc23/eng/20220218
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007376
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Meta George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to the editors and publishers of the following journals, in which these poems first appeared, at times in earlier versions.
The Baffler : “Almost a Mothering”; Beloit Poetry Journal : “The Algorithm Thinks I Need a Girdle,” “She threw herself upon the coffin”; Brooklyn Quarterly : “Arithmetic,” “Self-Portrait as Smaller Moon,” “Self-Portrait without Wings”; Harvard Review Online : “Back Porch Aubade”; The Kenyon Review : “Not if, but when”; Los Angeles Review : “Heaven Knows,” “Hypothesis”; Mom Egg Review : “Heaven Knows,” “Wrestling with Gods”; The Nation : “After All”; Pangyrus : “Causes Unknown”; Poetry Northwest : “What Is the Poem”; Provincetown Arts : “At Collinsville Bridge”; Salamander : “All Hallows,” “Self-Portrait as Fox in Daylight,” and “Self-Portrait Instead of Engine”; Southern Humanities Review : “Explaining Tampons to My Son,” “Fugue,” “My Son Hands Me the Family Letter About This Unit ,” “One Time,” “Self-Portrait with Refrain,” “Studies Show”; The Southern Review : “Self-Portrait with Washing Machine”; The Sow’s Ear : “Real Life”; and Tupelo Quarterly : “Self-Portrait with Alternate Ending.”
“Self-Portrait at Treeline” appears in More Truly and More Strange : 100 Contemporary Self-Portrait Poems , edited by Lisa Russ Spaar.
“Self-Portrait with Alternate Ending” appears in City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems , edited by Danielle Legros Georges.
“One Time” takes its first, second, and fifth lines from the caption to Shelly Julian Bunde’s painting This is Mrs. Lawrence Schlegel from outside of Hettinger, North Dakota . 2013, acrylic on wood panel.
Thanks to composer Scott Wheeler for his song setting of “One Time,” which is included (under the title “She Left for Good One Time”) in the recording Between Us All: New American Art Songs for Voice & Guitar by The Bowers Fader Duo.
“She threw herself upon the coffin” is for Elizabeth Cardoso and in memory of Jonathan Cardoso.
I’m grateful to the following programs and institutions for their support in the writing of these poems: Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Thanks also to my colleagues and the staff of the Writing, Literature & Publishing Department and the Marlborough Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.
Thanks to all at Red Hen, especially Kate Gale, Tobi Harper, Monica Fernandez, and Rebeccah Sanhueza for their attention, kindness, and hard work on behalf of this book.
Thank you to Jeffrey Harrison for selecting the book and for your empathetic and insightful comments on the manuscript. I’m so very grateful.
Enduring gratitude to my many friends, trusted readers and re-readers, and answerers of late-night emails and emergency phone calls and texts, especially Rose McLarney, Melissa Range, Tess Taylor, Austin Segrest, Claire McQuerry, Angela Sorby, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Cheryl Clark Vermuelen, Carrie Bennett, Jessica Bozek, Amaranth Borsuk, Nadia Colburn, Heather Treseler, Kevin McLellan, January Gill O’Neil, Joel Roston, and Veronica Quilligan, to the Quilligan, Ross, Perkins, and Berg families, and above all to my Andy and our Ita Mae & Charlie.
for my parents
in memoriam,
Ita Margaret Quilligan
Contents
House
Self-Portrait as Girl
Anxious Talker
Almost a Mothering
Self-Portrait as Smaller Moon
Journey
Milk Teeth
Self-Portrait with Alternate Ending
Back Porch Aubade
Real Life
Arithmetic
Causes Unknown
All Hallows
Self-Portrait Without Wings
Passenger Pigeon

What is the Poem
Fugue
Not if, but when,
Thirteen
Self-Portrait at Tree Line
Explaining Tampons to My Son
Wrestling With Gods
At North
Pastoral
She threw herself upon the coffin
Self-Portrait with Refrain

Utility Report
The Crossing
Studies Show
Not Near, But Far
Geography Report
Self-Portrait as Invasive Species
Fence

Hypothesis
After All
The Naturalist’s Report
Self-Portrait as Fox in Daylight
My son hands me the Family Letter About This Unit
The Algorithm Thinks I Need a Girdle
Heaven Knows
Self-Portrait Instead of Engine
At Collinsville Bridge
Self-Portrait with Washing Machine
One Time
House
I come from there, with lavender
growing small against the bricks.
I come from there, with a little white jug
and a tea towel on the tray.
I come from there, with a worn stair rug
and a wooden banister
leading up two floors, past bedroom doors
to a room at the very top
with a window looking down to a square
of grass and a garden wall
where roses grow with tangled canes
rooting between the cracks.
I come from where, I once was told,
someone attached a lock
on her bedroom door and didn’t say why
or who she feared
might open it through all the years
she stayed in the house with lavender
grown small against the bricks
and the roses rooting through the wall
and the tea towel on the tray
and the little white jug and worn stair rug
she descended the day she went away.
I come from there.
Self-Portrait as Girl
You were always looking for balloons.
Or not balloons themselves
but the feeling that they might appear
at any moment.
You looked for roads where there should not
be roads, checking them off
inside yourself. In the absence of dogs,
you were brave about dogs.
You felt you should love horses
but preferred trees—the way they moved
without leaving.
Once, you twisted an apple stem
to learn the initials of the man
you would marry. Once,
you held your breath
long enough to swim the pool’s width
fastest of all—each blue-green second
marking the length of you—
then gave your apple prize away.
Anxious Talker
There is a place where words are born
of silence , Rumi says.
Is it a place of anxious talkers,
the sort who can’t be in an elevator
without remarking on the weather,
not waiting for a response—
How about those Pats? Or a place
for all of us who knew the answer
in second grade but were afraid
to raise our hands and now can’t stop
shouting Seven! It’s seven—I know it too!
at the teacher who praised the one girl
who spoke, shaming the rest of us.
She was the same girl who pulled
your hair at recess if you wore braids
and once punched you so hard
in the thigh it left a bruise the size
and shape of the dark purple pansies
your mother planted each spring—
small purple flags to claim the soil
of a place she wasn’t born into.
Slowly, the bruise grew a yellow halo,
and you were silent about that too,
until your mother found it in the bath.
The words that came then were hers,
fear that you understood only as anger—
Why didn’t you tell?! —and a visit
to the teacher despite your pleas.
It wouldn’t work, you knew.
That night, awake in the silent house,
you fingered the bruise and heard,
or thought you heard, a humming
that might have been a word.
Almost a Mothering
Consider reduction—the five turkey vultures
making sleek dark circles above the field
this morning. They hunt by smell, I read,
but hunt isn’t right—instead they gather
from the air some wind-translated
sign of carcass. No punishment, nothing inflicted—
the angle of their plunge a means to rewind
body to material, almost a mothering.
Each afternoon, when the freight train
pu