Poem by Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Finalist for the 2019 Talking Writing Prize for Poetry
Reliquiae Flyway
starting with the thumbnail heart nut
hard gather of splinter wood
fungus of soft rot
she lays out her tools of dissection
scalpel-fitted blades 12’s & 20’s
forceps & curved scissors
squared on her diagram:
she’s routing the long Atlantic Flyway
supposing we are all saltwater
cloudburst’s accretions collected
gully-washers tasting of tin &
figment quickened rivulets
she considers reversing
death to birth / foul to pure
bodies down-breathed to marsh sedge
turned mud-plaster & razor-edge considering
she thinks we are each
each creature our own reach stretched to capture
graced or graceless amen amen succored
amen in this high making back to life amen amen
as though fine & potent
translates flight to her fingers
she considers wondering
what can it mean to translate
word-for-word movement
for movement &
if she wanted could she dart & sail & dive
stumble the root-caved
walk / plucked fallen / feeling reflexively in
its motility she pains
& pleasures with it for it recalling
its qualms & resistance
& blessings she makes herself over
allies herself forever
with fox sparrow against albatross’s & cormorant’s
& heron’s amaranthine capacities / boned wing bars
endemic or not / Horus the bird
-head not dust nor ashes
nor spun upward not
braced & chamfered / polished sheeny in fetch
& mount & accumulate & display
but street birds trusting the first hunch
amen
skeptics’ cold-cored guts in clean sheeting
vestigial / piled unwashed unembalmed
her moss-filled bodies sewn bright
& tight in warmth
in triple-stranded embroidery
cottons & silks
amen Amen
she sees herself sutured
in white work bird breast
stuffed & padded in patterned dog star & fern
couched in long & satin stitches
French knots & touch-me-not thistles
in cobweb markings preserved
by convent sisters proud enough
not to want to disappear she considers herself
an artist of innuendo she imagines
praise in her flight
—flushed & febrile—of the sort that only
comes with experience / passementeries
of shrubland & woods & wetlands & the millions
we are on land on foot looking up
stunned en masse congregants fledged
of this fragile coastline
Art Information
- “Reifel Bird Sanctuary, Delta, BC, Canada” © Lesly Derksen; public domain.
- “Out of a Foggy and Windless Sunrise” © Trevor McKinnon; public domain.
Mara Adamitz Scrupe is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently In the Bare Bones House of Was (2019 Brighthorse Press Book Prize) and Eat the Marrow (Erbacce Press, 2019). She has won or been shortlisted for the Grindstone Literary International Poetry Competition, Fish Poetry Prize, BigCi Environmental Writing Fellowship, Aesthetica Award, Erbacce Prize, The Plough Prize, Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, Periplum Book Award, Sentinel Quarterly Book Award, Stiwdio Maelor Prize, Cornwall Festival Competition, University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Award, and National Poetry Society Competition.
Follow her on Twitter @mscrupe.
