Andrew Collard
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The specter of skinned elbows—kid blood—still scrapes and tumbles down the driveway. Behind, the clicking of a baseball card on spokes, the wash of passing cars out by the freeway like marbles rolling off a wooden table, and the breathing of a neighborhood between. Distance gives even the deepest cuts a context: every bruise, every lie, every awful thing I've ever done bellows from where it rests in time, cohering like an orchestra to song. Somehow, hurt turns less severe, the way buzzing from a broken radio becomes a curtain soothing me to sleep. Three hours in jail, or six nights in a bus station, buried parents—the stretch of mornings after, when routine's quiet compass only points to absence—childhood's persistent embers, too, fall in, the way an aging tower reduces to stone. To be abandoned once, to grief, is not to be unceasingly abandoned; one cut, opened, can only bleed so long. The body does its stitching like mourners sift through rubble for a shard of bone, acknowledging the ache, or it expires, and goes where broken bodies go, like crayons, back in the box. |
Andrew Collard is the author of Sprawl (Ohio University Press, 2023), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Grand Rapids, MI, where he teaches writing at Grand Valley State University and edits poetry for Third Coast Magazine.