Here is Where You Don’t Belong
by Brenda Beardsley
You want to capitalize everything. Verbs. Cereal. Once, no, this morning, you grab a handful of something circular from the box supposed to be super-sized, but looks are deceiving. Maybe the box was oval, and inside, polyhedrons. Can you shape disappointment? Hue it willow or— wait, he was speaking of cogs. Maybe, it was you. Where do words go once they’ve been spoken? Distilled to consonant, vowel, phoneme, memory, then, amorphous. Motion is like that when it isn’t. Blur of intention cascading to the-barely-seen. Water stilted by plunging degrees. Stymied by slowing molecules. Capsized. What do we know of motion unless we stop or are stopped? It’s more defined by what it isn’t: un-motion, not tapping your green-tipped sneaker soaked by what blundered the sky; arching, like the cat’s back, a half circle that won’t be completed; the stopped-on-the-windowsill ladybug you are ready to squash. Insert longing. Piggyback tool, comma, glove, chatter, participles. There is always some crab who chooses linearity, a singular route you breach.
Brenda Beardsley’s work appears in Soundings East, The Bryant Literary Review, The Seneca Review, Paterson Literary Review, december, Fence, The American Journal of Poetry, among others. Nominated for Best New Poets 2023 by december for her poem, “Where the Redness Lives,” her recognitions include finalist for the 2023-2024 Poetic Justice Institute Book Prize, finalist for december’s 2022 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize, semifinalist in the Purple Ink Chapbook Contest, winner of the 2020 MVICW Poetry Contest, and Honorable Mention in the 2023 Seneca Review Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. brendabeardsley.org, @brendapoet.bsky.social
Photograph, October 12, 2024. Click image to enlarge.