by Susanna Lang

Uzès


A pigeon trusts our slender balcony with two eggs
though it’s September, and the leaves she stuffed
around the fragile shells are dry. A late start for her
as it is for us. We step softly, not to startle her
as we shift our few things here or there, looking
for the corner where a chair would be content to sit,
a comfortable space where the buffet can wrap its arms
around our plates and forks. She must have thought
she’d found a quiet spot, empty until we arrived
with our baggage, our foreign speech, a vacuum cleaner.
We want her to stay, want to feel her brooding
presence on the other side of the glass as she waits
for the weeks to pass, for her eggs to stir and crack
into loud insistent voices, into need and finally flight.

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Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This (Unsolicited Books), appeared in 2023, along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). She was the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Rhino Reviews, and The Slowdown.

by Susanna Lang

Once it’s been broken, the body
holds the memory of falling
as you would hold a fragile goblet
that belonged to your great grandmother,
whose name you also carry.

The body holds with two hands
the memory of falling, as you
would hold an entire tray of goblets.
That delay before you reach the ground,
the sound of something shattering

that blanks all other sounds—birds
silenced, no broom to sweep up
the shards, no arm to sweep with.

Cobbled together, the body walks
with eyes fixed on where the next
step falls and the step after that, sings
a few words over and over, once again
upright and moving across the earth.

Always the body holds its memory,
water brimming a goblet etched in gold.

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Susanna Lang’s third collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was released in 2017 from Terrapin Books. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry, and Verse Daily. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. She lives and teaches in Chicago.