for April Freely

“The birds are anemic in their song”  

There are ways to speak when
you want to speak around the truth.
Birds don’t sing when
an eclipse hits, not because they know
it is a special time, but because they think
it’s time to go to sleep. Imagine
being that biological. It’s dark and your throat
only works when the sun is out.
An age of quiet and cold. Liken it to a bird’s
deep slumber. But there are folks who speak
while sleeping. Light may have
nothing to do with it. I’ve never heard a
bird snore. At the funeral Jen says that you used to.
Talk, not snore. You used to mumble in
your sleep and wake up with it
still fluttering around in your mouth. If not
the light, then maybe circadian custom.
Maybe just plain tiredness,
which I feel all the time. After the funeral
someone hits my ride with their car, crumples my
head and shoulder against the glass pane, and
drives off. Post-concussion I swear I felt the
air swell with inky light, pain jerky and persistent
and eventually something liveable.
But I was silent before I screamed. I was silent
before the zip of the brakes. How can I
be mad at the birds. I refused the hospital.
I signed the form. It’ll be no one’s fault
when I die. I ran home, a halo of pigeons
fluttering around my head like a cartoon.
I ran to the tune of their wailing.

Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a Sewanee, VONA, Tin House, Watering Hole, and Pink Door fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing. Her poetry, plays, and prose are published by The Offing, Cosmonauts Avenue, poets.org, The Margins, and film distribution company A24. She has a poetry MFA from NYU. She sleeps in her bathtub in Brooklyn.

Emily Eveleth attended the Massachusetts College of Art in 1987 and recevied her Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College in 1983. Since the late 1980s, Eveleth has exhibited her paintings extensively in the United States, and her work is included in many permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, The Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, the Fairfield University Museum of Art, Fairfield CT, Smith College Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, and the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA. In 2010 the Smith College Museum of Art presented a twelve-year survey of her paintings. Her paintings have been featured in shows at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, The Neuberger Museum of Art, at SUNY Purchase, NY, AEIVA at the University of Alabama, in Birmingham, AL, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, in "All the More Real"at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, and the survey show "Painting in Boston 1950-2000" at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln MA. Her work has been written about in Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the New Yorker and the New York Times. Awards include grants from the Art Matters Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the French Government for the Artist-in-Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre. In 2002, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. You can find more of her work online through her website or through at Mile McEnery Gallery.