On hurricane days, Mama dressed us in life jackets and bike helmets and tucked us in the bathtub. We swirled prophecies of hair around the drain, soothsaying the rain by the pink of the water line, as Mama split her palms between all six ears and softened the linoleum with psalms, even the ones we want to forget. Blessed is he that dasheth thy little ones on the rocks. The echoes folded into a Book more believable than brimstone. After all—swamps don’t catch fire and we are a people of Genesis. Our second-lines stomping two-by-two through the Flood, with faith our johnboats can hold each of us and the family dog. Above us, the dove or more likely the heron, circles the swells until subsumed by salt, her babies still tucked in the bulrush. Or babies flown North to safety as the Atlantic spins carnivorously counterclockwise. One Christmas, I came home with a man from New York who didn’t know how to swim, and Mama gave him a life jacket to keep in his Camry just in case. My sisters laughed, and we all moved North to drier land where no one needs a johnboat. Where we can pretend creation purls clockwise, and more time is all we need—but when I see the rainbow on TV reverse our blue-green swamps to yellow-orange-red-black, I know it will end with Mama in her helmet, alone in the bathtub, holding her little dog.
The Bathtub
Feature Date
- August 1, 2024
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“The Bathtub” from A HISTORY OF HALF-BIRDS: by Caroline Harper New.
Published by Milkweed Editions on January 16, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Caroline Harper New.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Caroline Harper New is a poet, artist, and anthropologist from southwest Georgia. Her work is rooted in the precarious landscape of the Gulf Coast, where she explores human-nature relationships, maternal inheritance, and orientations to time. She is the author of A History of Half-Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2024), winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. Her other work includes sculptures, paintings, short films, translations, and eco-collaborations.
“There’s an untamed luminescence to Caroline Harper New’s debut, A History of Half Birds, a collection steeped in science and mythology.”
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books Blog
"A History of Half-Birds, an inventive and impressively wide-ranging collection, has me considering and reconsidering the connections between seemingly disparate things: between poetry and science, both fueled by curiosity, imagination, and possibility; between history and myth, precision and ambiguity, the known and the unknown. In the Anthropocene, we may be tempted to ask what poetry can do for us when what we need are tools for survival. I’d argue that these poems are just that—expertly crafted, satisfying to hold and behold, and sharp enough to dissect what needs dissecting. We’re so lucky to have this book here and now."
—Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod
“Steeped in Gulf Coast flora and fauna, Caroline Harper New’s A History of Half-Birds is a gorgeous collection of poems that spins widdershins like a hurricane. This book embraces life’s complicated dualities—the precarious gravity of Saturn’s rings, nightmares that visit with every new love, the way an anglerfish attracts both its mate and prey with the same lure. Equally embracing facts and lyricism, New weaves stray opossums and beached whales into love poems, jellyfish and memory into a chandelier. Each poem is full of the world’s intimate facts that suddenly become mirrors. They are tender and wise and illuminate their mysteries. It’s a truly beautiful debut.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
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