Contributor’s Marginalia: Traci Brimhall responding to Leila Chatti’s “Seaside”

Dear Seaside,

I love your monochrome brushstrokes, the way you open with an image, a natural contrast and the static fuzz of black and white competing to color the world. I’m old enough to remember the television on the wrong channel. Old enough to know my own empty ultrasound.

And I have spent time talking about my interior, although of course I mean in my own way. But still we carry our mirrors into other poems and stories and see ourselves there. I, too, have made a portrait of my wounds. A professional sorrow. But I think it is a beautiful labor. One of keening, of grieving publicly because grief deserves that.

Can I confess that it’s easier to grieve if I am not alone? I look for sadnesses that rhyme with mine in movies and songs and poems because I resist crying for myself. But alone with the company of someone else’s sorrow, and out come all the storms I’ve been carrying.

I love how you end with the “you,” almost writing to me. I think I am one of your you’s. I love how the final sentence is present and then it is past, and the present and past really do live in that final turn, that moment that lasts.

I wanted to write to tell you I love you, but my love language is acts of service, so I turned you into a scarf. I knew you would be mounds and waves. I knew you would be black and white. I knew, above all, you would be soft.

I studied your lines and counted your syllables, and then I made a pattern that shifts to match you. And I knew you would be an infinity scarf, a circle, a loop, a moon.

You can feel the weeping in the stitches when it wraps around you, which I have done.