Twigs and Knucklebones, by Sarah Linday

Twigs and Knucklebones
by: Sarah Lindsay

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Softcover $15.00 (116pp)
ISBN: 9781556591648


Quirky, macabre, vivid, and spellbinding, Sarah Lindsay's Twigs and Knucklebones melds science and art with astonishing facts that just might be true: spadefoot toads singing until their throats bleed; an explorer tumbling into an Antarctic crevasse and swinging from his tether like a pendulum; a young girl playing a house like a trumpet. At the heart of the collection is an extended poem about the fictional kingdom of Nab, a place characterized by outlandish figures, including megalomaniac archaeologists, jerboas, goatherds, and the strange god Nummis.

Many of Lindsay's poems occur in extremis, and the situations are often severe and surreal with titles such as "Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto" and subjects as odd as the discovery of a mummified bog person in a potato farmer's field. Her poems often span -- in the space of a few lines -- centuries, cultures, and contexts, as they open to new worlds and unveil new ways of seeing that are undeniably grounded in the present

In her latest collection of poems, Twigs and Knucklebones, Sarah Lindsay revels in the pleasure of being omniscient. Writer and reader alike enjoy the privilege of superhuman knowledge in poems that blur the line between the apocryphal and the real world. A spider crawls out from the ash in “Elegy from Quagga” as if to say, “Not yet”; however damaged, the world remains. (Erica Wright, Foreword Magazine)



Underground Orchids

Life on this planet persists in knitting its minerals
into animal and vegetable variations, behaving at all times
like the central point of the cosmos,
and because it is water it seeks the paths of least resistance
and pauses sometimes to admire itself,
because it is earth it might subside in camouflage
or darkness or cease to move for its own good reasons,
because it is air it may seem like nothing
yet be the invisible sustenance of oceans or forests or a shade of blue,
and because it is fire it leaps and is uncertain
and leaves smelly waste and goes everywhere it can uninvited.
It presses its lips where boiling sulfur cracks the ocean floor,
swims in acid cavities below the roots of mountains,
burrows and flits and infects and strangles and hatches,
constructs mats, reefs, trunks, tunnels, stained-glass windows
and ad campaigns for raspberry-scented chinchilla dust.
Mammalian bipeds especially intrude where they are unfit to go,
chewing coca leaves to walk on ridges where oxygen falls away,
training beasts to carry weight in the desert and drinking their blood,
beating sea water back with little hands.
On the southern ice cap, one turns his frozen socks inside out
and shakes his blackened toes into his lap.
In the country he comes from, earth is parched,
air warped with the heat he longs for.
Thirsty flies glue themselves to plants that begin to digest them;
modest orchids bloom underground. In his country
glinting saucers are filling with penicillin
while soldiers don uniforms. There is singing.
A shimmer over cannon mouths. Fire consumes. Mud consumes.
Many stars since they were born
have been sending their light to shine upon us,
but some are rushing away as fast as they can.



(Red Moon, by KSB)

Starlings on the Line

One hundred European starlings
released in Central Park discovered America,
settled its apple trees and woodpecker nests,
but the fifty or so let loose in California
earlier, in the prosperous 1880s,
failed to thrive. Too small a flock, perhaps,
or too bewildered. What season was it?
Time to hunt snails and spiders, or look for cherries, or hawthorn and holly?
Too much newness--
scorpions and lemons.
Ultramarines, infracrimsons,
high-pitched shades of gold. The last four
hunched in a row on a telegraph wire
for a couple of days, then opened their wings
and shrank into desert sky,
trailing their new-learned songs:
Dot dash dash dot
dot dash dot dot
Please come home
Ma sick
Sailing Tuesday next
Need authorization
Need contract
Need your assurance
Please send two hundred
by mail by rail by August please
explain please inform please remit please return
please please please
dot
dot dash
dot dot dot
dot




(Small Green Moon, by KSB)

Menagerie

Three darknesses are my menagerie:
The hole at the base of this stone wall, the shade
lying deep in that thicket yonder, the earth
hereabouts that a gray fox goes to.

The porcupine draws his needles out
of the shade, sometimes, if I leave him salt;
the fox shies out on her weightless feet,
sometimes, if I clear the lawn and play music;

the badger I have not seen. The grass,
between quick dances, accumulates
my futile offerings: bits of roast beef,
carrots, glowworms, marzipan.

I’ve brought out my easel and paints for another
portrait of a stony opening,
empty of the one I await
while either pretending indifference

or bowing before where I think it is,
the decisive beast, who will come to me someday, surely, if I stay ready always,
the moment I am not ready.



Sarah Lindsay is the author of Primate Behavior, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Mount Clutter, as well as two chapbooks, Bodies of Water and Insomniac's Lullaby. Copper Canyon Press will publish her next collection, Twigs and Knucklebones, in fall 2008. A graduate of UNC-Greensboro's MFA program in creative writing, Lindsay learned to set type and bind books by hand at Unicorn Press in the 1980s. She makes her living as a copy editor in Greensboro. "Underground Orchids" and "Look Again" previously appeared in International Poetry Review; “Starlings on the Line" previously appeared in Orion; (The Morse code at the end of that poem spells out "please.")