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Praise this Place
Pickling
. . . everything springs from the deeply plural earth
The pickle exists through the simple act of preservation. Ever searching for the sea, we mimic its salinity with a generous dousing of sodium chloride dissolved in scalding water and turn the whole thing over to vinegar, to the chemical beauty of mingling molecules agitating the turmoil of fermentation. Whether the tucked leaves of a cabbage head suck the masala pungency from the brine, or thin moon slices of magenta beets bleed from the sting of salt, whether mushroom caps, round and fortunate, or carrots accosted with the sweet spice of ginger root savor the brackishness, everything springs from the deeply plural earth. We store the marinated concoction and thus safeguard our futures, stave off our own rotting, preserve all that is ancient and worthwhile into one crisp bite of vegetable love.
Lifting the dead
When I switched from squats to deadlifts a few weeks ago, I have to admit I was a little sad to give away one metaphor–carrying myself out of a burning building–for that of another–lifting the dead. But I got over it pretty quick, metaphorically at least.
And I could say that my efforts are wrapped around notions of becoming a new, better, stronger person by disposing of that old, “dead” self. I could say that with every lift I’m fighting off the terrors of a bleak, immobile future. I could say that weight lifting allows me to lift away a yolk of self-doubt and emerge, 82.5 pounds later with superpower insight and unwavering badassness. But that’s not the case at all.
You won’t believe me, but I do it for words.
Squat: to “thrust down with force,” (modern English) from the Old French, “esquatir” (to flatten) by way…
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Waking Up to the Earth–Aboriculture
One Hundred Degrees of Plum
Two Poems for My Veins
Infusion
If I had to choose
between snakes’ fangs
and tigers’ claws
to name the needle
piercing my flesh
I select the cat
whose stripes burrow
all the way to skin
because this hunt—
dangerous as an open wound—
leads the seeker
to my blood
and the venom
is already present.
from Mouthbrooders, Homebound Publication, 2019
Generous Bruises
At the bank the teller catches me
counting on my fingers—the same feeling
I had chasing my sister’s bike down
the unpaved road. She would fall before
I could catch her. As the road curved
I was thinking how little I have
to rely on; I should run faster.
Caught in the act of failing, used up again
dwelling in those Hopper paintings
where nothing vacillates, nothing
is weak, and all the women wear black pumps.
Their isolation—so original, it makes them
efficient, but keeps them separate.
But consider this: a crystal’s structure
appears only when cracked. We experience
the same self when the I cracks
and our breath runs out. We earn
the favor of being by breaking
revealing a symmetry so generous it bleeds.
Watching a bruise heal from the inside out
it’s the color that matters:
never black nor blue, but shades of yellow
and one hundred degrees of plum.
from Four Blue Eggs, Homebound Publications, 2017
“The way the body tethers us to the earth”
“Mouthbrooders, by Amy Nawrocki, is a collection of contemplative poems, an exploration of the relationship between the creature self and the life of the mind.”
Read the entire review at Necromancy Never Pays, Jeanne Griggs’s blog about all things literary. I’m grateful to her for her review.
Like the speaker looking for her reading glasses in “Hourglasses,” readers of Nawrocki’s volume are glad for the reassurance that “there is no failure/in blinking yourself into clarity.”
Jeanne Griggs
Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveler, and ailurophile. She directs the writing center at Kenyon College and plays violin in the Knox County Symphony. Check out her new collection Postcard Poems, available from Broadstone Books.
In Postcard Poems, Jeanne Griggs presents a family travel album. These vacation notes take us to iconic destinations, out-of-the-way downtowns, beach rentals, bookstores, art museums, and two-star motels. We hear the voice of a speaker longing to taste stale Cheerios and sip hot tea, watch the children wade in the surf, and make the distances between long ago and yesterday a little more tolerable. Griggs crafts a quiet cadence of absence to say: “Here I am now, missing you.” In the end, this collection helps the traveler in all of us realize that we are never “just visiting.” We piece together the narrative of our life’s travels one postcard at a time.
—Amy Nawrocki, author of Mouthbrooders & The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory
You Are a Grackle
You are a grackle
I say out loud to the black robed bird
and her iridescent head, purpling in
a bright May afternoon. You are a grackle
I say to the voice in my head which uttered
without thinking, hello mister starling.
You are a grackle I correct myself,
as she fluttered into a budding tree, lost
behind the rumor of a shallow wind.
I am a grackle, wings repeat settled again
into the departure of flight. I am a grackle.
You are a grackle; I am a grackle we whisper
to each other, shoulders turned, heads aloft into
the cadence of song. I am a grackle
I am a grackle I am a grackle I am a grackle.
Choosing Peregrine
This essay appears in the anthology Wildness: Voices in the Sacred Landscape, published by Homebound Publications, copyright 2016.
But whether it was a bird of prey
Or prey of bird I could not say
~Robert Francis
My husband calls me from upstairs. Hurry. Quick. Look out the window. Do you see it?
The front yard slopes toward the road, about thirty feet from the house. The blacktop of our driveway, and a low gray rock wall give way to a grove of trees, a blend of grey bark, brown earth, and the pale paper of lingering beech leaves. Thinned out in late autumn, the laurel trunks twist and spread their muted and monotone still-green foliage. A weathered stump and the lamp post are the only variables. Eric is pointing, directing my eyes, which see only the tessellation of space between laurel branches. There, behind the light, scan just to the right. The low branches. Do you see it? I have to find the movement with my eyes before I put the binoculars to work. He’s told me by this time what I’m looking for—a peregrine falcon and its kill.
It’s the junco’s white belly that alerts me first. Shredded white feathers scatter—emptying as if from a torn pillow—scatter, not falling to the ground but filling the space around the two birds. By the time we’ve repositioned ourselves at the second floor window, she’s flown to a higher branch, a vantage point better for our view, and more stable, perhaps, for the harder work of flaying the junco’s breast, a better angle for the scalpel beak, leverage for talons. Through the binoculars, she is a giant, but the magnification diminishes her effort. She could not have carried her prey too much farther than the neighboring branch she decided on. Downy, with elegant grey plumage, she wears speckles and delicate brown dashes on a whitish underbelly. I’m surprised by how blue she is. The sky matches her with snow-worthy slate. At various angles, tawny cheeks and a black mask bob in steady motion, shielding the claw-clutched prey, instinctually hiding what no one else can have. Nothing else moves in the yard. She is at it for forty-five minutes. I am at a loss for words. By the time it’s over, all I have is the conviction that peregrine is more melodic (and I think) more accurate than falcon, and this is how she should be called. That may be all the precision my retelling can muster.
I wonder about this as I sit down to my notebook. The camera has failed in such unforgivable ways, and memory is doomed to be insufficient. What else do I have? The worlds outside our windows should be shared worlds. I want to preserve the episode for my future self, to recount it at family gatherings, tell my friends through social media. I want to brag. But the nature we experience through others will always come through a filter. I take this to heart. “There is nothing in which people differ more than their powers of observation,” wrote John S. Burroughs. As a nature lover, I cultivate my powers of observation. As a poet and teacher, I practice seeing and sharpen the senses by trying them out on paper. Like deciding to open the window or draw the shade, I deliberate on a point of view.
I told you about a junco, but it could have been a nuthatch, maybe the one I watched traipse down the oak this morning after insects which I haven’t bothered to name. The woods are filled with unnamed critters, some visible for mere seconds at a time. Most never surface from earth cover or give up their camouflage or grow big enough to be noticed. Notice matters; spectacle speaks. The peregrine is singular; the everyday birds multiply and seem interchangeable. I may be able to describe any one of them from memory, if I could only be sure of its pedigree or be able to scan the table of contents of its daily migrations. As the peregrine’s anonymity vanishes into a declaration of authority, the victim becomes just another white bellied meat source. That’s one way of telling it. When I shift my vantage point, the quarry becomes small and delicate, slow, uncoordinated. A junco with its own story, its own beauty. Its black eyes pierce a cozy landscape of forests and food; a feed stop offers suet and kibble. A shadow passes; there is no escape. I hold my breath because I don’t want to disturb the moment. I exhale, and I’ve already altered it.
Any snapshot is filtered by the viewer’s eye and a lifetime of other sights. I do not intrude. Or do I? Our choice of words matters so much and we must consider them as we would territorial boundaries. If I say surveillance, do I imply deviance? If I chose bird’s eye view, do you applaud my attention, or mock my sarcasm? If I say hollow bones rather than banked blood, which is accurate? When staving off hunger wins out over lunch time, the value of one sunflower seed, one unlucky bird, goes up like a sprinkler in a year of drought. The actions I describe can never be neutral, and you are always in my line of sight. Phrases like habitat loss echo through the woodlands like the tapping of beaks. Survival of the fittest signals the surrender of tree mites and dormant caterpillars. And juncos. As literate creatures, we hold much in our hands, the language of fight and of flight. The natural world—so vast and varied, so holy and violent—will one day disappear. We will all fade into the sepia print of the past. The endurance that nature teaches us is what we have to bear the loss. It may seem a small thing, but the way we catalog what we see can shape the extent of our preservation and shape our ability to heal and honor, celebrate and remember. It is an earned privilege—the naturalist as chronicler. If I say watcher, do you think witness? If I say prey, do you hear prayer?
Peregrine, from the Latin meaning “one from abroad.” A wanderer, one who migrates. The peregrine stands 15 inches and can spread its wings three and a half feet. Peregrines mate for life. Both parents tend their young. The peregrine can catch prey in flight and reach speeds of 240 miles per hour. I choose to tell you this. Do you see it? She has pierced the windpipe with her talons and killed the bird instantly. She is hungry. She will eat its bones. She is beautiful. I try to capture her, but she flies away. She is both my words, and beyond them.
Light the light that will unblind us
Ritual Each night at dinner, in lieu of grace, my mother lit the center candle on the table. We children were allowed two fingers of wine from the icy jug that was kept cold out on the front porch. The seven of us shared bread and casserole on our full plates and the light filled the room with luster. Each of us had a task: clear the dishes, wipe the table, snuff out the half-melted candle, its smoky trail reaching to the ceiling like fingers folding into prayer. When the washer was full, we’d stand by the sink, my mother and I, her hands plunged into the soapy water, mine holding a dish towel, removing the dripping pans from the drainer, and wiping the water away, to expose the shine. We’d stand there in the evening hour quietly perfecting every keepsake minute. Later in life, I stand in class, by the desk in front of students as we discuss short fiction, plunging into emerging themes. A daughter and mother in one story bathe together in a tub infused with herbs and bark. The same characters travel to market to gather bread, butter, and fish to prepare together later. The mother preserves the daughter’s childhood in a trunk: plaid dresses and yellowed blankets, mementos aired out and refolded again. In capital letters, I write ritual, chalk powdering the folds of my slacks. Together we learn that these acts are connective tissue that bind our muscle to bone. Though pages away, miles, or even years, we, as characters break bread, fold hands into each other’s, light the light that will unblind us. from Four Blue Eggs
annotations at year’s end
“Encounter on a Wednesday” was the first poem I brought to poetry workshop, 30 years ago, give or take a few Wednesday. Poppy for remembrance; annotations for sleepwalking.
Homegrown Literature
I am honored that Mouthbrooders has been selected as a finalist for the 2020 Connecticut Book Awards.
Check out the other finalists and register for the virtual ceremony event, October 15, 6:00 p.m.
Today
I miss the rhododendron that dried
last season and still rusts where orchids,
hot-house born, will be fed with
three sips of cold ice.
The Beauty of Faces
Loving the Maybes
At my home in Connecticut I am able to get out into the world and see possibility despite quarantines and shutdowns. We live at the top of a hill, and one of my routine walks is up and down (about 1/2 mile both ways). A bigger loop brings me around the neighborhood, about 2 miles. We also have a semi-circle driveway with slopes and a sanctuary of laurels, oaks, and a few half-way hidden blueberry bushes. Twenty minutes, about 15 times around, is a mile’s worth of walking, enough time to circle and see what usually goes unnoticed. Repetition and wonder.
I found this little guy on a hard-to-figure out chestnut yearling. I prefer the worm’s philosophy about walking. On my own, I’m just walking in circles.
Circumstantial Dragonfly
She wants to quell vertigo as certainly as a guillotine slicing the perpendicular
“Circumstance”
Aide Memoire
A poem from my latest collection Mouthbrooders, published by Homebound Publications.
Visit the store to order and support National Poetry Month, Independent Publishers, and writers who want to share their words.
Brainwaves Video Anthology
Check out Brainwaves Video Anthology on You Tube. Take advantage of the filmmaker Bob Greenberg’s hard work, and browse a diverse anthology of videos featuring writers and thinkers from across the spectrum of literature and culture.
because they lied
the ones who promised . . .
Mouthbrooders
During six months of vocal cord paralysis, author and professor Amy Nawrocki turned to the written word and fell in love with language again. The result of this exploration is her stunning collection Mouthbrooders, full of sounds and their echoes—ravens screeching, eggs cracking, and acorns falling. As Nawrocki struggles to find her own voice again, she midwives the voices of catastrophe, of memory, and of the small miracles of everyday life.
“Amy Nawrocki’s new collection Mouthbrooders is precise and carefully contained. Each poem is a vessel crafted to express one perfect thing: how saliva works on a burn; the tender terror of bringing a word or a child into life; the pleasure of “rigatoni…heavy/ with artichokes, cream sauce,/peppercorns slowly braised/and crushed under a fork”; the desire to “sample” one’s own flesh; a conversation with a peregrine in which the persona asks, “Tell me about the wind, the kind/that quiets fear and lengthens your cries/ into inaudible whispers.” Mouthbrooders is a collection to savor.”
Laurel S. Peterson, Norwalk Community College, Poet Laureate, Norwalk, CT 2016 – 2019
From the Archives: Pea Soup in October
Also from the archives, 1992.
Blue Moon Diner
He might have been blind.
In my hourglass
recollection, I don’t believe
he ever looked at me
with his eyes–spacious,
window-like; each blink
the metamorphosis of a streetlight
from red to green
from grey to gray.
Aged cacti prickles
crowned his head; roadmapped
baldness charted the constellations
of his travels. To hear
restaurant monologues
in my novice ears was to see
wisdom printed on a napkin.
He said I looked New Englander, like himself.
I heard him say sheltered,
smiling. Professor
of all that is reachable, witness
of revolution, student
of places where clouds paint
shadows on the landscape,
his slight cricket body
carried mountains.
I saw myself journeying
through time tattered windows;
I saw the vast-heavy earth
deflate to a school child’s globe
filled with places I will go to
when I know the color of every star.
I sipped coffee, sugarless.
I did not ask his name.
I did not think
to ask his name.
finding my inner earthworm
My explorations of voice and point of view have led me to the creation and publication of Mouthbrooders which is now available through Homebound Publications and where ever books are sold.
During six months of vocal cord paralysis, author and professor Amy Nawrocki turned to the written word and fell in love with language again. The result of this exploration is her stunning collection Mouthbrooders, full of the sounds and their echoes—ravens screeching, eggs cracking, and acorns falling. Faucets drip, pens brood, souvenirs slip through fingers. As Nawrocki struggles to find her own voice again, she midwives the voices of catastrophe, of memory, and of the small miracles of everyday life.
back-cover copy
A few years back, I ran a workshop at the Miller Memorial Library in Hamden, CT, where we discussed our connections (personal and literary) to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll’s book never really grabbed me as a young reader, and after reflecting as an adult, my associations were more negative than positive. This isn’t really surprising, since at their roots, the imagery and adventures in the children’s tale are scary and uncomfortable.
On the other hand, rereading the text, I began to notice the language and the way that Alice (and Carroll) described the processes of transformation. In particular, at the bottom of the rabbit hole, she encounters the “small passage” and “[longs] to get out of that dark hall and wander those beds of bright flowers.” As she laments, she wishes that she could “shut up like a telescope.” The phrase struck me as peculiar, both visual and metaphorical. I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head, and so eventually wrote “Shutting Up Like a Telescope” to probe my own ideas about fitting into spaces.
Here is a different exploration of my reflections on Alice and her adventures. I wrote this exploratory memoir following the workshop:
Finding My Inner Alice
I come to Alice from a tree branch, from a separate limb. Maybe I’m the Cheshire Cat, watching myself watch her. I have no immediately accessible memory of time or place. No matter. I see from my pocket watch that I’ve arrived too late. She’s already gone down, and only by looking back—or looking through—or catching my reflection in my own looking glass—does she manifest.
My mother read to us often, and I recall, impressionistically, other books: their muted green covers, gold edged pages and pen-and-ink drawings. This is how I can render Toad and Rat and Badger in my mind from Wind in the Willows. I can still touch those pages.
Though I can’t pinpoint how I came to know her, it’s not hard to picture Alice, her blue dress and white pinafore painted like so many others in the Technicolor of Disney. But whether her image is a piece from a specific moment or a combination of moments, I don’t know for sure.
But it seems that my memory of Alice begins on page 8. I imagine that I’ve seen this drawing before, and that the first time I saw it I felt something. The image of long-necked Alice, stretched like silly putty and uncomfortably large, frightens me even now. It conjures in my mind a sense memory, something tactile, as if I can feel the vertebrae in my own neck separate. But unlike the thrill of seeing each inch of your life penciled on a hallway wall as you grow and age, I see Alice’s elastic neck as strangulation, instead of release. The key I need is out of reach.
Instead of watching my feet disappear underneath me, I watch a body in torment, and just for good measure the Queen of Hearts has come along to say with all the echo of childhood discomfort: “Off with her head!” The rabbit hole is dark, and the looking glass reflects a fat little girl who can’t stand to be seen.
Alice’s neck is most vivid because it speaks to my nine-year-old self and the torture that my own body inflicted on me. Betrayed by the little cakes and drinks of “cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee and hot buttered toast;” betrayed by birthdays and elongating limbs, adolescence simply became “curiouser and curiouser,” and I became sadder and sadder. Even now, Alice’s long neck frightens me out of my skin.
Purchase your copy of Mouthbrooders and check me out on Soundcloud.
Giving Up the Chokehold
I’m looking for a soap dish. Knowing perfectly well that I’m probably rummaging in the wrong place, I pry the circular top off a stenciled craft box on the high shelf of the bathroom closet. It’s an old jewelry chest full of broken chains and strings laced with beads, unmatched earrings, a small butterfly shaped ceramic case which used to hold my mother’s wedding rings. Among these artifacts are three fabric necklaces, chokers I haven’t worn in years. I take one out and study it my hands. Hey, remember this? Remember the costumes you dreamed up trying to hide that silly scar?
The choker is dusty blue, about an inch wide, machine woven in a comfortable uniform pattern, thinner and flatter than rope cortege, secured at both ends with silver bands, a few ring extensions and a lobster clasp: adjustable. Its twin is black, and a third version is a thin zig-zag, like trim binding from an old sewing kit. I try this one on. As it’s supposed to, it chokes me.
When I woke in the hospital twenty-five years ago, there were a lot of things to figure out: what happened to the summer; what about college; who are all these strangers; how many animal names starting with the letter M can I remember in 20 seconds. There is a girl who stares out from a Polaroid who bears a close resemblance to my 19-year-old self. She has very short hair, an acne starscape on her face, a forced smile with vacant eyes. She wears a blue knit top with bateau neckline which does little to hide a very red, very prominent scar above the breast bone, below the chin, dead center on the throat. She hates it.
I have no memory of how the scar came to be. Its story is completely blank. I remember a fever in June and I remember a new Christmas dress. Everything in between is black. As I recovered slowly from viral encephalitis, a neck scar should have been the least of my problems. But like the other peculiarities of the summer of 1992 into the winter of the next year, repositioning myself as a patient and not a student amounted to piecing together details and rebuilding a self. There was physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, art therapy, and writing therapy. Group therapy. Visits with doctors and psychologists. Painted flowers and lined notebooks. Diagnoses and prognoses. Turtlenecks. No one said “tracheotomy;” no one said “breathing tube.” No one said it would ever go away.
A plastic surgeon reshaped the gap to a more tolerable slit, like a small zipper etched in vein-dark purple. It’s uneven and looks carelessly sewn. It feels soft and surface-y. Behind it is the laryngeal prominence—the Adam’s apple, the nub where my voice vibrates. Part of my struggle in recovery was learning to reclaim my physical voice, which is the second most recognizable element of the self. The first is visual: who we see in the mirror. Therapy and time aided in reclaiming both, but the voice and the scar which stifled it are difficult to reconcile. Spiraling through a black hole, all one hears is silence.
Unlike the small scar on my knee, which has a vivid origin story linked clearly to the blacktop of the school playground and a long, blood-dripped journey to the nurse’s office, there is no tactile connection to surgery or pain, bleeding or knives. This makes it more like a birthmark, except that it didn’t show up at birth. Talking about it always seems more than overly self-referential; it seems false. Reconstructing the days and months when I was recovering becomes a game of hopscotch picking up pebbles and hopping on one leg, stumbling through nothingness. That may be how all memories are re-claimed, but for a long while I certainly didn’t know how to own this thing that meant deficits and handicaps, embarrassment, explaining the inexplicable. Being on a diet of antiseizure medication and anti-depressants, testing boundaries at home and at school, afraid of relapses as well as social stigmas, failing neurological exams—all of this meant learning to hide in a different way. I became good at ignoring an isolated past and denying a scary present. I am not sick; I am not broken. Unlike the other patients, my brain injury was invisible; there were no crutches or screws holding metal plates in place. But as I continued to deny that I had changed, the scar seemed to stand out more and more. Others may have seen a remarkable recovery, a journey back from a lifethreatening illness. I still saw only the hole, imperfections and reminders.
I could say the necklace fetish began the next fall when I returned to college, but it really goes back to that Polaroid my father took of me at the hospital, which created a sort of tunnel vision for me. Instead of messy hair, droopy eyes, or a double chin, I saw a horrible intrusion, an additional curse that summed up all those pre-adolescent discomforts and awkwardness my body had persistently granted me. Here we go again— one more thing to mark me as ugly and awkward. Bring on the masks.
Make up never worked. I’d pat face powder around it, fiddle with shades of liquid foundation. This resulted in shadows, lines, and the guarantee that I would be more conspicuous. One time at a family gathering, I went to hug my brother, and then had to brush make up off the lapel of his suit. My neck had left a clear imprint. High collars and turtlenecks were decent enough, but I could never get the knack of scarves or find a fitting style. The chokers made perfect sense. My sister bought me a few made of black metal or fake silver. One had miniature beads, another three strands which lay decoratively on my neck. These were fashionable, but didn’t cover the whole scar. Even simple silver chains became caked with dried make up. My only option was to stop thinking about it, to quit these obsessive cover-ups.
There was no moment of clarity; no epiphany of healing. I did what rehabilitation taught me: I went on with my life. I lost weight, began working out, and when the vanity of aging shifted to gray hair and wrinkles, I fixated on it less. I fell in love and married a man who thought it was beautiful. Accepting its visibility became a kind of invisibility. Confidence grew and successes followed. The voice that had been crushed by my inadequate windpipe recovered too. I could hear myself again.
When I think back on it, most of the time spent on cover-ups and self-consciousness is rooted in a world view that I’m not ashamed to hold. There are others in the world whose scar stories are much more heroic. I don’t think my story is heroic because everyone has scars, many which are earned in violence and remembered pain, knives that are not lifesaving in but fought off defensively. Even scars born of adventurousness and folly, from drunken fires and unfenced trampolines, are etchings of disasters that have been survived.
My father wore a scar from the top of his sternum to the bottom of his ribs and a matching one deep in his thigh. A surgeon opened his heart and laced a vein from his leg tying it a quadruple bipass. I never asked him if he was bothered by his scars, though another I know proudly claims hers with low cut shirts and a brave bosom. A friend at work has her zipper down the back of her neck; it closes the skin against her brain stem where a surgeon rearranged her nerves. In all the years since my trachea scar centralized my preoccupations, only one person asked me about it directly.
If I see beyond the rote mechanics of a doctor’s duty and open my eyes past the camera’s lens, I find a long line of people who cared very much if I lived or not. I begin to see past the anonymity of flesh and knife to the faces of my father and my mother, my sister and brothers, friends who sat vigil and prodded me back into a self I could recognize. Eyes whose gaze I scorned now belong to nurses and therapists who taught me to speak, students whom I’ve taught to listen. I see a notebook with childlike scribbling, practice pieces that would morph into poems and find themselves in the spine of a book. I see my husband and I understand finally what he means when he says the scar is strong. If we wear them in life, then each scar represents a gift of life’s daggers: healing, closing the void, a return from breathlessness.
When I put my finger to it, it’s easy to feel beyond the skin, to think beyond scalpels, cartilage, and vocal cords. Like air holes in a wood flute, fashioned to a specifically harmonic note, there is poetry in the necessity of such a cut. Windpipe. Rough artery. Incision. Larynx to lungs. Trachea. Like a whistle, a dolphin’s blowhole, a volcano. Tracheotomy. One third of a haiku.
Amy Nawrocki 