Grimoire
Heather Derr-Smith
| poetry
It was like dying. Or terror falling from the skies in Guernica.
Or the yearning of prisoners, how she fell out
of herself, sometimes, forgetting
her name. The feeling was worst when she wanted to be loved
by her origins, mother and brother, the whole congregation who
called her like some claim, or
pronouncement,
speaking her out of her own form, and into their mouths like
traps. Shut up
she said, shut up. You’re in Dubrovnik.
I can’t hear you.
She went into the woods. The butcher bird
fixing its prey upon a thorn
another on a forked branch.
So many dead bees under a tree
where the butcher birds had dropped them,
just a waste of violence for its own sake, a kind of
play.
It was not always kind to know another,
how knowing could seal someone’s self to itself, immoveable,
unable to
escape.
Heather Derr-Smith is the author of four collections of poetry: Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and most recently Thrust, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, published by Persea Books in 2017. She is also managing Director of Cuvaj se, a literary and human rights NGO supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict zones.