Rachel E. Hicks
Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

Rachel E. Hicks - Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

Poetry
Rachel E. Hicks’s poetry has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Relief, St. Katherine Review, Gulf Stream, and other journals. She won the 2019 Briar Cliff Review annual fiction contest, and her… Read more »
Leslie Harrison
Fortune

Leslie Harrison - Fortune

Poetry
Leslie Harrison's second book, The Book of Endings (Akron 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement (Mariner 2009) won the Bakeless Prize in poetry. Recent poems… Read more »
Steven Leyva
How Our Sons Learned to Fight

Steven Leyva - How Our Sons Learned to Fight

Poetry
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, and Prairie… Read more »
Linette Marie Allen
Old Testament on West Preston

Linette Marie Allen - Old Testament on West Preston

Poetry
Linette Marie Allen is earning an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore. Recipient of a Betty Tarpley Turner Research and Travel Award for Poetry, she recently… Read more »
Kathleen Hellen
Trail, cleft

Kathleen Hellen - Trail, cleft

Poetry
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on… Read more »

Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

Rachel E. Hicks

I. Home My bed groaned each night as it received my body in the dark. My coffee cup was yellow enamel. Late afternoon sun illuminated the window seat, the perpetual dust on the houseplant. My home knew me as I knew it. No footpath exists leading back to these things. II. Solace In exile there is a strange solace—I would never ask for it, yet here it is: in my brother’s grip as he holds my face, his desperate kiss on my cheek, the green threads of my sweater on barbed wire, tracing my path across miles and miles; in the camps where we wait, each day a misery and a marvel, each person also. III. Story My story is singular: my son collected bullet casings along the way out, made a necklace for his sister under a tarp. The day we left, the charred pages of my diary fluttered all around the living room, where a shell had just blown out the wall. The dancing pages made a strange poem in my heart. IV. Language I was unable to speak for many days. Natural expressions, gestures—I lost this language. No one understood, perhaps not even my wife. I let silence have its way: germination was occurring. I took this on faith. Not everyone can. Hope is not a virtue—it happens, or it doesn’t. V. Welcome In the terminal, a friend waited, embraced me. To him I was still of abundant use in this world— the witty professor who always spoke le mot juste. I clung to his arm, wept silently as we walked out through the door, into a city night that pulsed and spun. It felt like rebirth. VI. Grief When at last I could speak, I let sorrow name itself— the bitter and the sweet. My wife winced, changed the subject; my children clasped my hand. I was trying to learn the word for joy that settles awkwardly in grief’s nest, an oversized bird. I didn’t want to scare it away. VII. Purpose There is purpose in displacement—I feel this deeply. I don’t know what it is yet. My wife’s tears, my own, are larger, wetter; our laughter round and warm; the tread of my shoes, brim of my hat—these sensate things bring such pleasure. It has to do with magnification, with being sure that I am alive. VIII. Remembrance Sometimes I look back, walk slowly, linger where necessary. It makes no sense that a soldier can press a button and somewhere a baby ignites into flame. And he goes home and brushes his teeth. What we do to each other, to other created souls. Always I carry this burden like a child on my hip.
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