A Room Stacked with Newspaper
You tell me your memory is a room stacked with newspaper.
Sometimes you enter, swipe dust off the stacks, turn the brown pages.
Some you never looked at. You left us those and they are silent.
Is this organic? this gesture of one hand, this surrender? the way your surgeon says one brain hemisphere disconnects from the other? Is this the gesture of fireweed and wild rose, horsetail and lupine, stinging nettle? To lie down at last? Say, nothing comes between us now? Or is this the moment when rain begins?
Wind begins, a sound like someone moving a heavy armoire, or the oak chest of drawers in my childhood room, with the warped oval mirror and aluminum sheen. Birch limbs flail like scissors, crossing land, a flock of brown birds in the sodden field. I would show you pictures of this bay, now overlain with peach and pale blue light, jagged between clouds and mountains. I would show you — Here is Tuesday. And here is Friday, noon. This is your daughter, Eva. And this. And this. Rain drums the roof at night, like your fingers, and the wind — a moan, a chant, a hum, a brushing shoulder, indifferent to me. I like to listen to the rain, Mama, on my red tin roof. When it drums harder, I'm relieved. It's a release, a long exhalation holding my breath. Or the way it stops, as if it never was at all, as if it had always been this silent.
Feature Date
- October 14, 2023
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Copyright © 2023 by Eva Saulitis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poet and marine biologist Eva Saulitis studied orcas in Prince William Sound, Alaska from 1983 to 2016 with her partner Craig Matkin. She was the author of Prayer in Wind (poetry); Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas (memoir); Many Ways to Say It (poetry); and Leaving Resurrection (essays). Her work appeared in many journals, including Crazyhorse, Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, On Earth, Salon, and Orion. A recipient of the 2013 Governor’s Award for the Humanities, she lived in Homer, Alaska.
Summer/Fall 2023
Anchorage, Alaska
University of Alaska Anchorage
Editor-in-Chief
Ronald Spatz
Senior Affiliate Editors
Robert Clark
Stephanie Cole
Christine Byl
Amy Meissner
Carol Sturgulewski
Hannah Perrin King
Shane Castle
Debra Pennington Davis
Alaska Quarterly Review is one of America's premier literary magazines and a source of powerful, new voices. Works originally from AQR have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; The Pushcart Prize; The Beacon Best; The Best American Mystery Stories; The Best American Essays; The Best American Nonrequired Reading; and The Best American Poetry.
"One of the nation's best literary magazines."
—The Washington Post Book World
"Original and fresh."
—Stuart Dybek
"Playing an impressive part in our national literature."
—Laura Furman, Series Editor Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
"Highly recommended and deserves applause."
—Bill Katz, Library Journal
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.