Brittany Perham is the author of The Curiosities (Parlor Press, 2012). Her recent work may be found in Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Lo-Ball, Linebreak, and elsewhere. She is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University, where she held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from 2009-2011. She is a member of the word/music project Nonstop Beautiful Ladies and she lives in San […]
I don’t believe in poetry. This might be the last poem. The neighbor’s Pekinese barks his little head off every time I unlock the door. The lock is loose, I can turn it with a knife. I raise African violets like those my father used to bring me: stereoscopic purple, four yellow fish-eyes to a […]
1. The bulb of the ocean, clam-rich, shoe-swallowing. If you live here, you find a skiff that can make the crossing. Safe-house, water-palace. Small rivers the slippers step over. Plaster-work, mosaic, a sailor’s alphabet on the wall. First salt: mud tasted in the arm’s crease, in the black around the nostrils. Even the fog won’t […]
Notice the clingy stink of sea things pinned on sand. A smell particularly Atlantic, one unnoticed by one like me: born here. When they’ve ticked your name off the passenger list, and you are asked, professionally, to board, your voice’s downy afterfeather is the first to go in the clippings of wings, the horn, the […]
I don’t believe in beauty: my lover beside me beautiful: my father often a liar: I don’t believe you: my father always I love you: father I am always saying father: you have never been here in this house: mother beside her lover sleeping, brother and his often-lover radiator hiss or is it whisper? asleep […]
It’s a loud business, to the untrained ear. And so much snow, it’s hard to imagine a road ever existed here. Even the truck, tire-chained, back-weighted by a full bed of sand, can’t hold its corners, entering the sliplace of crusted pasture, even once disarraying someone’s spring-stacked heap of burn wood. And as the plow’s […]
Dad is throwing a party; he can’t stay. Dad is putting on his winter coat. Mom is showering because the water’s hot. Dad says, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Dad is putting on his winter hat. Dad will tap the back of brother’s hand before he goes. Brother is here with his eyes […]
Brittany Perham talks about the title poem of her collection, “The Curiosities.”