Rachel E. Hicks

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 poems have been finalists in other poetry contests. She is an associate editor at Del Sol Press and works as a freelance copyeditor. Having lived in seven countries, she explores themes of displacement, worldview, and connection in her writing. Some of her favorite things: electric scooters, Sichuan food, and hiking. Find her online at rachelehicks.com.

Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

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.

“ When I was fourteen, my family and other foreigners were evacuated from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, following a week of violent rioting and looting of the city by soldiers and civilians fed up with corrupt government and skyrocketing inflation (I blogged about it here). That experience of abrupt displacement—coupled with my life as a global nomad—gives me a deeper empathy for others who have been displaced. This poem grew out of my own lessons learned, the experiences of dear Bosnian refugee friends, and stories I’d read of Syrian refugees’ experiences over the last few years. It takes the long view, looking at what settles, what emerges, what remains, and what connects or distances us from one another in displacement. I’m grateful for the Maryland literary community’s generosity in giving space and encouragement to writers from elsewhere. ”