. . . the sheets hold a diagonal crease: the memory of the line, an imprint as obvious and useless as the adult our childhood selves once planned to be.
Scodellaro’s characters have autonomy, know their comforts and desires, and find space and safety in the corners of forgotten places. They grieve on countertops, chewing ice and waiting for the return of a lover who has left for another.
My love, I signed / what papers they put before me. / The next morning a breeze / swept in across the bar. I watched it lean / the white sails toward starboard / and lift your heavy ashes / into the air.
Slowly/Suddenly is presented as a diptych in the Table of Contents, perhaps mirroring Blevins’s commitments to other forms of art, but her poems’ progression from Part I to Part II is not a linear narrative, not a Before & After.
As I say to myself, living under the reality of this new, second cancer, I am rich in minutes. Maybe not in years, or, who knows, even months. But minutes, yes. So, I try not to squander them.
But this sense of being able to open yourself up to wonder is something you can do at any age. You just have to open yourself to it. Frankly, for me, it's a whole lot easier to do that when you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're cold and you're hungry.
To wake to the sound of Marwa seeping through the bowl of a sarod / That rests over the limbs of a woman in the balcony—or not. / To follow the melody across rooms, beyond the descending sun, /. Into the kitchen—or not. A call and response—or not.