fire; fists
My sister kept finches
caged above the desk
where she sketched futures Grandma banned:
Paris
mini skirts with wing-back shirts
and other sins with satin trim.
The last morning of finch-trill,
God was a spark in the walls of that room, and
we were out when the spark caught.
We were out when finch-trill stilled.
We were out when tongues of fire began to speak.
We came home to cinder-steam.
We came home to a quiet cage.
We came home to what remained.
Grandma said
ashes to ashes, dust to dust and good riddance to
fat sketchbooks
reams of dreams
so many things with wings, but
my sister’s hands were fists.
Grandma said
have faith, trust his plan, God wills it but
my sister’s eyes were smoldering coals.
Knees kneading dirt
she packed earth
over ash-flecked feathers
and scar-charred wishbones.
What could not fly, she buried.
What would not burn, we carried:
Warped metal.
Silence.
Fists.
TRACIE RENEE
Tracie Renee (she/her) is a librarian, a Publishers Weekly book reviewer, a three-time winner of the Grand Prize in Poetry from Outrider Press, and a Best of the Net nominated writer who lives and dreams in sort-of Chicago. In 2024, Tracie's short story "Dinners with Ghosts" won Elegant Literature's "Borders & Boundaries" contest and her work-in-progress middle grade novel-in-verse was named a finalist in Authored's Rising Talent competition and selected for the Write Team Mentorship Program. Read more and connect here: https://linktr.ee/tracie.renee
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
I think there is so much great sound work, layered with really intense images, that so effectively get at the burden of inherited womanhood. The sing-song nature of some of the sound work gets at the nursery rhyme feel little girls are often taught in order to keep us in line, paralleled with the biblical imagery of fire consuming, and the repeated anaphora of some of the lines, really gets at how gender norms and religious norms are beat into young women. "What would not burn, we carried:" is an amazing example of how we continue to carry with us the heavy things our mothers taught us, and their mothers taught them. Anaphora throughout helps the reader learn how to read the poem, but the offset text forces attention to the lines. It feels to me almost the way memory is played back and forth in someone’s mind as they try to decide what is true to the memory and what has the mind invented to cope.
Also, this is the second time I’ve seen this poem. It is really lovely for me that writers will revise and resubnmit based on my feedback. It’s hard not to feel impartial when you’ve seen where a draft started and where it ends up! Tracie really worked hard on this poem and I really admire that process and getting to see the poem develop and come into itself is a huge honor.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
This poem combines themes of religious trauma, girl culture, and body autonomy, which are things I apparently write about a lot. Based on what I'd seen Taylor publish in the weeks leading up to my submission and the fact that her debut poetry collection is entitled "Bone Valley Hymnal," I was cautiously hopeful that she'd vibe with these pieces.
How did you go about choosing images to parallel and stack for this poem?
This poem is loosely based on an autobiographical event that I've been trying to understand for almost thirty years. There was a fire in my house on Easter Sunday when I was fifteen, and my college-bound sister—an aspiring fashion designer—lost her pet finches and her entire art portfolio. While my parents aren't in this poem at all, they divorced shortly after the fire—so in many ways, the event I'm describing was a catalyst of change, a moment of pivot. We all became something else to survive it. To shape that experience into a poem, I spent some time looking at word lists related to fashion and reading articles about fashion trends to curate phrases that both told the story and sounded nice together, ultimately landing on: "Mini skirts with wing-back shirts. / And other sins with satin trim." The number three also has special significance in both Christianity and nursery rhymes; I kept that in mind as I revised, cutting phrases and lines so that the final poem has many little clusters of trios—and when the poem breaks from that structure, I like to think it speaks to the tension at the heart of the themes. Last but definitely least, I turned to some kind poet friends/critique partners—Bea Forkan, Claire Taylor, and Stacey Ramirez—who gave gracious feedback to help me figure out what worked (and what didn't). This part of the process—the critiquing and sharing—is still new to me and still a little scary, as a MFA-less writer who has basically just been hording bits of poems and stories on a hard drive for several decades.
You write with a lot of intensity, or at least you do in this poem, where do you think that comes from?
Ah, thank you! Short answer: I don't really know. Long answer: I think there's always been a part of me that feels things very intensely and that's why I became a reader and a writer: to feel the feelings in a safe space, to let them out and make them make sense. This poem is particularly intense because fires themselves are intense and surviving one is an intense experience. I've learned that when I have a strong emotional response to something that happens, it generally means that there's something to unpack there, something worth exploring—in this instance, faith. Sisterhood. What it means to survive. To surrender. To fight. To go on. Over countless revisions and lots of years, I wrote and rewrote this piece in many different ways—paragraphs, flash, a prose poem, a list with bullet points, first person as the sister, third person using an omniscient "we"—before landing on a version that felt the right-est. I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how many things I write or how old I am, I'm still learning. Poetry is how we yoke the world, make the hurt sing, and find the hands that will help us carry the load.