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      September 14, 2023BellsJulia Clare Tillinghast

      I dreamed my son was joining the army
      We were driving him there in a flood
      My mother-in-law and her daughters
      Were in the car with us crying
      I take a yellow packet of fake sugar
      That says it’s made from real sugar
      From the cupboard and think about gratitude
      How sad I am when I wake up
      And I have run out of fake sugar
      How now when it’s here
      I just take
      And I don’t really give a fuck
      There is a bad side to this kind of exercise in gratitude
      Where you hear a story where you know it’s a fact
      That someone brought a machine gun into a school
      And shot a group of kindergarteners
      And you put down your work
      And you get in your car
      And you drive to a school
      To hold your six-year-old son
      And feel how alive he is
      There is truth in that gesture
      There is gratitude
      But it is not a good thing to every day
      Think about children dying
      My teacher says there is a romance
      Between aspects of our body
      A couple who are deeply in love
      But never see each other
      She goes into the apartment
      And can smell
      That stuff he puts in his hair after he washes it
      A water glass with his kiss-place on it
      A kiss so quiet now
      As to be invisible
      She touches everything
      Plays his record
      Takes a nap where his body was then leaves
      The second her silhouette has vanished
      The man comes home
      He can feel that she’s been there
      This is the human self
      Desire, ambition, caution, boredom,
      A bell always swinging from east
      To west, the sound of the heart
      How hard it is to live inside the big picture
      Hard maybe impossible
      We have answers but somehow not enough space in the brain
      To hold them all at once
      All at once which is how we really are
      Alive and dead
      So children’s hearts are immortal
      Because we need them to be
      Every moment they beat
      To keep the children running
      Because they are children,
      And are dying
      Because we cannot let them die, and we do

      from #41 - Fall 2013

      ulia Clare Tillinghast

      “Becoming a single parent is, for some, freely chosen, and undoubtedly for others, wholly determined by circumstance. However, for me and I believe for many, many single parents, it is a strange combination of choice and no choice. That is, we choose to bear a child or to separate from a partner because we must—because of a deeper demand or calling—for our physical or emotional health, because of a just-knowing deep down what is right for ourselves or our children. I believe this is similar to the choice/no choice that calls a person to be a poet or an artist of any kind. Parenthood, especially single parenthood, often forces a crisis of selfhood. Most of the things that facilitate a well-developed sense of self become scarce, very suddenly and for a long time. Poetry, on the other hand, which thank God can be written quickly, while children are sleeping (as was my poem, ‘Bells’), is one of life’s great teachers of self. Because it mandates super-heroic honesty, it can open great caverns of space—of deep truth, of moral and emotional complexity, and of undomesticated freedom—in very short periods of time. I cannot imagine being a sane parent without it.”

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