She was right about this place, the unforgiving winter months sullen, sunless, bitter, but then spring a dream God has and lets us slumber in until October.
Susanna ChildressAugust 3, 2021
My brother has come to live with us and how could we know how deliberate his hands would be: at the sink, thawing beans stringy from too hot a June, smoothing hairs that whisper about my sons’ ears, locking the door against the snow. His hands move slow as a dream, the kind where no one watches out for you as you slip over the edge and sprawl wordlessly down mountains of air or time or floors of people doing…
Susanna ChildressApril 23, 2015
Here they brought thousands of the hurricane’s dead. Even the dogs knew to stay away, low rumble in their throats, September begun with a lurch and a dream. My husband teaches sixth-graders, cannot explain why here, town of the archangel, bodies keep coming, their second deaths: his students have started school with Call of the Wild, and where in the past girls blanched and resisted the chapters of blood and rage, boys triumphing with their own pubescent gestures— they don’t…
Susanna ChildressApril 23, 2015
MARCH/APRIL 2013: POETRY by Susanna Childress Tell me snow is falling on the willows now, fat, full, unhurried, for my strawberry-haired nephew sleeps, his body beneath a blanket knit brilliantly blue, his body wilted with neuroblastoma, and here on the couch, I hold his head and wonder at what's sent from above, what we'd believe drifts down during these months of ice, so far north we need Easter to end winter for us—not Eostre, Teutonic myth, vernal equinox, not eggs,…
Susanna ChildressMarch 1, 2013
It's that time of year when most of us are savoring the last little remembrance of summer and watching the torrent of greens make a slow burn toward orange, red, yellow, and brown. If you're inclined to find an apple orchard or a late field of raspberries and set your hands to the goodness of their yield, you might also tuck this volume in your bag and ask the proprietor of said landscape if you could sit awhile to read…
Susanna ChildressNovember 15, 2011