On the themes of Bra and Epitaph
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
These last weeks, I’ve been searching for signs –
on the river a red helicopter hovering above a boat called Quantum
while across from Liberty the faces of the clocktower stand frozen at five past four,
first at the deli, then at the café’, Proud Mary playing,
and out my bedroom window, the strange bright chirps
of the birds building a nest in the blind winter night,
and, speaking of birds, everywhere the pigeons that have been flying at me –
one scrabbling its claws against my umbrella,
another glancing off the top of my wool hat,
though homely and dirty, its wings outstretched with confidence –
since you fell from the sky.
Once you were a small boy who didn’t cry
when you were stung by a bee, but accused with dry eyes,
Look! Look! Now, I told you it would bite!
Then it was you who called me Tough Guy in Toisanese
when I had stifled my tears after grazing my knees,
and then held me, my chubby arms slung around your neck.
Later, you told me how matter could be neither created
nor destroyed, and, since the universe was breathing, expanding
and contracting like sand dissolving into the sea,
it was possible for particles to behave as waves,
waves as particles, joined in space and time.
PORTRAIT
Maddy draws me –
a head,
a pair of boobs,
and beneath, a womb
where the egg,
a speck of black pen, lays.
Author Biography
Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the poetry collection TURN (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) and has been published in such journals as The Raintown Review and the Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge. She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal, poetry editor at Stealing Time Magazine and The Nervous Breakdown, and is staff interviewer at Lantern Review.