Breather

BY Ioanna Carlsen

Back in the time when you breathed
I would say breath to you and you
would answer back,
I would say breathe to you and you would do it:
I could have filled a community of breathers
with what you had,
it was free, a birthright,
day and night, black and white,
it was yours, given,
the acceptable inevitable companionship of opposites,
in and out, breath or death, breathe or die,
the human situation.

Birds talk about it
from one tree to another,
conversing across a small valley,
they know what they talk about,
they know something is wrong —
your breathing, or dying,
they know and talk about it,
while inside this room with big picture windows
we whisper about it.

We whisper
and they discuss it through trees
and across a small valley,
in their secret language,
they chatter it all out, gossip,
how we lost our power:
what we couldn’t imagine, couldn’t control,
happened.

 

Biography

IOANNA CARLSEN‘s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Nimrod, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Mondo Greco, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI and many other literary magazines. She has been a featured poet at Poetry Daily and Poetry. One of her poems was chosen to be part of Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. Her fiction, featured in Glimmer Train, has been included in an anthology entitled Mother Knows, published through Atria (a branch of Simon & Schuster). Five of her poems have also appeared in a new anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Pomegranate Seeds (Somerset Hall Press, 2008).

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