Contributor’s Marginalia: Emily Banks responding to “The Summer of Small Boys” by Amy Fleury

Amy Fleury’s “The Summer of Small Boys” envelops readers in an unnamed grief. From the poem’s onset, we see the speaker moving through what should be an idyllic scene with the unique loneliness that comes from failing to feel the emotion everyone around you is, or seems to be, projecting. Under the opening line’s “mercilessly blue” sky, we feel the kind of oppressive pain that transforms everything into an antagonist. The small boys and their parents unknowingly taunt the speaker with their very existence, representing that which she has lost, and her preoccupation creates an impenetrable barrier between her and the cheerful summer they inhabit. This poem is so evocative for me because of how Fleury portrays the relationship between the speaker and the “you,” presumably her beloved: the two are bound by a shared loss, but their distinct experiences of the loss create a gulf between them. Fleury palpably conveys the solitude grief throws us into, even when we are not grieving alone, and even as we find relief in companionship.

Heartache binds the speaker to the “you,” with whom she shares the unfulfilled longing for a child, the invisible mark that sets them apart from those surrounding them. “I have to borrow your gumption just / to get up and live,” she relates, implying that her partner has found, or at least is exhibiting, some strength she hasn’t been able to. I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s devastating classic “Home Burial,” in which husband and wife are driven apart by their different expressions of grief after the loss of a child; he suffers stoically while she languishes and, as the poem teaches us, neither amounts to an easier process. Fleury’s poem moves deftly between singular and plural pronouns, illustrating a fluctuation between her speaker feeling like an “I” or a “we” in relation to the you. She relates, “I cannot help my avid stare” before shifting to the plural as she writes, “Their chirping voices leave us stricken,” acknowledging their corresponding emotions even as their outward reactions differ. When she says, “By reaching for you I keep myself / from touching the milkweed floss / of their hair,” she restates her reliance on the beloved while also illustrating the effect of loss on desire—in this achingly tender moment, her gesture of touch brings comfort but cannot make up for her inability to attain what she really wants.

Desire thus portrayed draws my attention back to Fleury’s “Naming the Dolls,” which precedes “The Summer of Small Boys” in this issue. In her depiction of the speaker and her cousin playing with dolls as children, Fleury describes the “squealing” and “rooting” of newborn pigs whose birth “was no / pretty thing” alongside her own “mewling cries” for a baby doll with hair “mostly loved off,” imbuing what could easily be a quaintly nostalgic scene with a darker, urgent energy. The final lines of “Naming the Dolls”—“I touched our faces / together, plastic to skin, whispering / her name, which was just Baby”—characterize the longing for maternity as a private desire; while the two girls play together throughout the poem, Fleury leaves us with the speaker alone, cherishing a moment of contact that feels subversive in its secrecy. This covert craving highlights a rich element of “The Summer of Small Boys” when the poems are read together. We see the wish for a child as shared between the couple, but there is something about the embodiment of the woman’s aching that cannot be translated between them, that, like the doll’s plastic face, must be felt alone.

“People,” Fleury’s speaker tells her partner, “don’t see the boy-shaped space / between us.” By referring to others as “people,” here, she drives home the feeling of isolation, the sense that our grief makes us somehow incompatible with humanity as a whole. The phrase “boy-shaped space” encapsulates the poem’s dichotomy; the space both separates and connects the couple. Visible only to them, it binds them together in their discrete modes of sadness, a juxtaposition that recalls for me the lines “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs” in James Wright’s “A Blessing.” While this poem moves between “I” and “we,” it ends, hopefully, on “we.” Fleury’s final lines imagine a boy who “wears dragon pajamas and runs / ahead of us in flashing shoes, looking / back to be sure we will follow him,” emphasizing a need for unity as the two must move together out of grief and towards the future’s possibilities. It is a beautiful sentiment to complete a poem that doesn’t spare us from the isolating pain of absence and longing. Touching upon a particular kind of loss undoubtedly relatable for many readers, it perfectly captures how grief drives us towards solitude even when we know relationships are crucial to our surviving it.