Twenty Tiny Elegies for the Girl Who Fell from the High Bridge

 

  1. You were born during an ice storm in Colorado, two years and one day after your sister.
  2. We moved to Arizona. You stayed small a long time and I wore you on my hip.
  3. I must not say I lost They tell me to say you are dead.
  4. When I took you and your sister to the supermarket, sad-eyed ladies in the produce
    aisles turned to you, withered hands reaching.
  5. One day, during an asthma attack, your soccer mates said you were the first blue living thing, apart from sky, that they’d ever seen.
  6. You named your sister Miss Bouvier and she named you Miss Beaufufont. You battled. You drew one another’s blood.
  7. In Arizona, you’d lie on your back atop the flat roof and watch the Perseids trace their glowing arcs through space. Later, in Minnesota, you saw the aurora do the same thing.
  8. On summer nights, we watched scorpions fluoresce in the blue-black light by the pool’s edge. I told you I caught fireflies as a girl in Michigan and you asked if I was ever stung. You thought venom made them glow.
  9. Your sister made a sign for her bedroom wall that read Go fuck your false gods. You pleaded her case and I let the sign stay.
  10. The cat killed your parakeet. I found her behind your sister’s bed, still rocking to a tiny rhythm as she bled. When you came home from school, I told you she’d flown away.
  11. One Christmas, you wanted mother-of-pearl keys for your trumpet.
  12. In Costa Rica, you entwined hands with your sister to hold a thin, yellow snake. It looked like your fingers were woven together with a pale, living cord.
  13. I buried your box of ashes myself, using my whole body to push the damp dirt into the small grave.
  14. Your friend gave me a hawk feather and said it would help hold the grief.
  15. I found a bag in your apartment filled with rusty washers, three harmonicas and several hand-sewn puppets.
  16. When people spoke to me of god’s will, you told me in your new voice to remember the sign on your sister’s bedroom wall.
  17. It was a thrill, you said, to fall through the rain forest, safely tethered to a zip-line. I say your cells remembered that joy and thus you fell fearless.
  18. Your sister, my living girl, lives hurt.
  19. One August afternoon, you ate a PB & J and ran out the door, hoping the sky would clear by nightfall.
  20. Later, to look for falling stars, you went out on the bridge, high above the trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author of the article

Poetry became a means of survival for Sue Reed Crouse after the death of her 20 year-old daughter Laura in 2008. Poetry came closest to deciphering the confusion and sorrow. Sue is a graduate of the Foreword Poetry Program at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She explores themes of grief, nature and relationships in her poems. Her work appears in many journals including Grey Sparrow, Damselfly Press, and Earth’s Daughters.