Tag: darling hands darling tongue

Wardrobe Best Dressed: Sally Rosen Kindred’s “Naming the Never-Birds”

Naming the Never-Birds

[Peter] regretted now that he had given [the birds] such strange names that they are very wild and difficult of approach.
— J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy

If he’d called them Lily or Cinnamon, maybe
we’d know them by smell. If he’d said
Redcloak, Daggerbird, Seventh Sword
we’d have stories to tell about them,
taloned showdowns in a storm-struck grove
that made thrones of the branches
where each night they angle, practically nameless,
over our wakeful heads
and wail. We wouldn’t
have been afraid to fight
the Pirates if we could have lifted
our arms like a legend’s wings
and flown down over the dark hills
and bled whistle-cold rescue calls
culled from the myths
we never made. If they’d been
Fivestripes, Taper-bill or Pileated Goldtoe
we might have turned to science,
we might never have believed in fairies
and then Tink would have died the time
she dimmed and stumbled
and our crude hands clapped her back. The birds
would have raised her body high that day
in a trajectory we could have mapped
with instruments precise as their names, lifting her
to her favorite tree, the bent birch
where we’d first found her, scolding them. If
they’d been named
what she’d called them then
(Butterbreath, Snailtail)
we’d have had a sense of humor. And if Peter
had called them Mother and Father
we might have gone home,
we might have needed their songs
like milk and their reds like air
and their rough wings descending
like the hands we missed and missed.

“Naming the Never-Birds” appeared in Sally Rosen Kindred’s chapbook, Darling Hands, Darling Tongue, available from Hyacinth Girl Press.  Purchase your copy today!

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of two books of poems from Mayapple Press, Book of Asters (2014), and No Eden (2011), and two chapbooks, Garnet Lanterns (2006), winner of the Anabiosis Press Prize, and Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Hunger Mountain, Verse Daily, and other journals.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith. Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press, 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Wardrobe Best Dressed: Sally Rosen Kindred’s “What Wendy Darling Tells Her Brother”

What Wendy Darling Tells Her Brother

“Listen, then,” said Wendy, settling down to her story, with Michael at her feet… “There was once a gentleman [whose] name…was Mr. Darling, and her name was Mrs. Darling.” “I think I knew them,” said Michael rather doubtfully.
— J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy

Don’t you remember
living behind bricks,
dry paper asters flowering to the wall
and curtains rough and broad
drifting past the glass that held us?
The yellow roses pouring down our mother’s dress?
Don’t you remember
the smell of her—lemon and ash—
her skin’s speckle like wrens’ eggs
and the warm wind of her moving in
off the edge of the bed, to hover
by cool sheets and bring her hands
down on your face
like rain? We were safe there,
bandaged to our beds by cotton quilts,
hearing the scratch of toothless things—
her slippers’ dull drag on the tile.
Sometimes I want to follow the sky back
to that dream, where I’m
a daughter again and you’re
nosing someone else’s knee.
We carried coins and umbrellas
and read a black clock on the wall.
And though it wasn’t real
it was home. And though it was in time
it was ours, the mother and father
who draped the air, their bodies strange
and soft with yearning.
It felt right to have a mother, to live
in the lap of a world I hadn’t made.
Don’t you remember?
It felt just like this story
that I am telling you.

“What Wendy Darling Tells Her Brother” appeared in Sally Rosen Kindred’s chapbook, Darling Hands, Darling Tongue, available from Hyacinth Girl Press.  Purchase your copy today!

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of two books of poems from Mayapple Press, Book of Asters (2014), and No Eden (2011), and two chapbooks, Garnet Lanterns (2006), winner of the Anabiosis Press Prize, and Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Hunger Mountain, Verse Daily, and other journals.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith. Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press, 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.