About This Title
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Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural – flowers, speech – to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: “-- i am learning to lift -- my voice -- like a flower -- in -- a field of flowers --” The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.
Excerpt from "CHILDHOOD"
In the apartment with the orange
shag carpet, is one long table
surrounded by chairs,
only four of them matching,
and cups and pitchers and food, and large,
silver plates for sharing, a pot,
a ladle, a child’s small and noisy toy,
and all of it empty of people.
Everyone has rushed out hurriedly
in the middle. Somewhere,
that room exists still, floating
toward the sun. The meat
and grapes petrified with years.
The cloth bleached by light
persisting through the windows.
Now the rattling of plates, the clattering
of forks and spoons. Louder to us it calls
the nearer it gets to the end.
It is saying one last thing.
Excerpt from "AWAKEN YOUR WILL"
Many years from now, the birds screamed
To each other in the lessening night
And something shook me from the dream
Of horses. Before I could close,
One had run out into the dry, hushed bed
Of the river whose bank
We laid our sleeping bags beside
Following the teacher’s printed map.
The horse made a sound,
His left eye shone purple
Against the flashlight light.
How close, its hooves.
Years from now, but it is
Calling to me
Like a so cket
Of sight:
Awaken your will
As when everyone was here.
