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Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (published November 2024 by Copper Canyon). She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, and the Academy of American Poets. She’s the Poet Laureate for the State of Kansas.
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Dayto watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
Meet me in the mint field under a black umbrella. Half your memories wait there in the shallow burial of a cigar box labeled My Once and Future Homecoming.
The prairie and its empire of grasses aged from green to champagne, and my pupils are useless in this biblical light.
A stray wandered through the backdoor I left open.
I gave it your middle name, picked it up by its neck. Ticks studded its ribs like proofless rubies. I do that a lot now, leave doors open. See how little I’ve changed?
I still cover the eastern windows with masking tape X’s in every storm. Once I was in love with leaving, with wearing
a dress with forty-two white buttons down the back.
Now I know the German name for the counterfeit darkness you see when you close your eyes translates to ownlight. When I press my eyelids looking for it, red spreads
its knowing stain the way the oil in our fingertips once darkened pages of hand-me-down erotica as we sucked
each other’s toes. The months after you left, fantasy
was a form of injury. I catalogued each What if in cursive to try and wish my way across the thin distance between faith and waiting. Truth is, I put up with your bad waltzing
because it made you close enough to kiss, to push the pin in your boutonnière into your breastbone. I think I might
be in love again, this time with the finch pilfering purple
coneflower seeds in my garden. You loved, once, the prayer in me where a prayer shouldn’t be, the crisis with a theme. The way I kneaded breath into the shape of you.
How your absence reefs my skin. How your breath once did. How you tailored your sentences to almost but not quite reach
the floor. The parts of me that ache for you lately are incus, malleus, stapes. And when I whisper Come back to the scentless side of the bed you almost do, or your voice does—my heart
in its bone kennel, shaking, convinced it can hear you from that far, from here, from this home I cannot live in or leave.
Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press), Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Parks Service, and is currently the Poet Laureate of Kansas.
