2021 CLAIRE KEYES POETRY AWARD WINNER - CHIVAS SANDAGE
Treating language as a living thing, making words delicate entities to be handled with as much care as we give the wounded and dying, Sandage writes of loss and despair, as well as hope. There is an exactness about the poetic in this work, a clear vision of what is at stake in the ways languages speak to each other through the experiences they embody. In the poet’s vision men who cannot cry cannot be trusted, but the vision also extends compassion to those who appear to fail us. This is poetry of a whole vision, where the art is engaged with the issues that turn us, as history lives our stories for us when we cannot accept the voices in mirrors.
Afaa M. Weaver
2021 Claire Keyes Judge
THE LIST
She writes a list: pomegranate,
potato, salt—recalling candlelit
dinners, how the clink of silver
and a song spoke for them.
Flushing, she unwraps her scarf, writes
“lemon” remembering
the hard slap against her jaw,
the shock of her lover’s blow.
She recalls looking up into fierce,
squinting eyes of the one
who’d engraved “love like the sea”
inside her wedding ring. She
recollects most every word and the sharp heat
swelling under her cheek. That sting
took up residence in her mouth. Now,
every time she opens her jaw to speak,
there’s the click of bone
against bone. “Onion,”
she writes, flashing
on looking up at Hokusai’s rogue
Great Wave, the rough sea cresting—
its white claws above their heads.
REQUIEM FOR A REVOLUTION
(after Twitter’s Arabic Voices and others who, during the Arab Spring, reported and compiled words and phrases spoken and chanted by protestors in various languages and dialects in the streets. This list became known as “Revolutionary Arabic for Beginners” or #RevArabic.)
A Tunisian fruit vender struck the match.
Here is the word for Enough! Kefaya!
Bullets sprayed into a square's sitting protesters
while I heard the relentless trickle of water
under the meadow's knee-deep snow. When I told
my white American teenager how the people
wrote the revolution one sentence at a time,
her eyes widened then emptied when a passing car
caught her gaze and she inserted earbuds.
Here is the word for bullets: resas.
Pick up the word. Hold it in your hand.
Feel its small, final weight. Its power
and powerlessness to spell the future.
See how it shattered prayers at a funeral.
I turned from the computer screen. Windows
framed my lucky, privileged village,
every surface lined with snow. After
each day’s attacks, I read the news, walked
to the market for meat and fruit, while boys
asked the army where the bodies rest.
Shadow of smoke from our chimney danced
over the snow. The fire blazed.
Here is the word for safety: aman.
A dark river shone through the trees
under a full Snow Moon. Every window
on the south side of my little house held
a version of the river’s black silk.
When protestors' songs erupted, I heard
the explosion of metal with sharp, hot
speed and human cries. Each bullet distinct.
Here is the word for martyr: shaheed.
Suddenly as it began, the rain of bullets
slowed—each shot paced, effortless
as afterthought. And when that rain stopped,
it was not silence that rose but the cries
of men still upright. Here are the words
for “We won’t bow down.” mesh hntatay.
Here is the word for anger: ghadab.
Blood: damm. “Half my family protesting,"
a witness said. Protestors ran in circles
around the bodies of flattened statues
in trousers and white short-sleeved shirts.
Fat splotches of blood bloomed in time-lapse.
Screams ricocheted against asphalt and stone.
A man beat his chest and flapped his arms
as if to say, Take me! Take me! Murderer: qatal.
Two empty black chairs, seat deep in snow, waited
under bare maple while blood spilled from the heads
of children. Here, the words for “I bear witness.”
Ash-hadu. Hope: amal. Open the word
like a house. If you cannot open the door,
lift a window. Tomorrow: bukra.
My country: bilaady. The world
bore witness. Ash-hadu. I asked
my teenager to X the earbuds, told her
young people planned the revolution
on Facebook. "Cool," she said, plugging
her ears again. The city had fallen, they said.
This white American watched from a computer screen
while other mothers far away watched from windows
until darkness filled those monoliths
of glass. Ash-hadu. The word for water: ma’a.
One mother watched from her doorstep,
clutching a rag to dry her hands while the streets filled
with sons. The word for youth: shabab. Injustice: tholm.
Tear gas: ghaz miseel lildemua’.
Streets choked with men and boys, how did she
get to the market? The word for bread: khobz.
And what of the daughters, sentenced
to their homes? From the Arab Spring to the Arab Winter,
one violent patriarchy followed
another. Ash-hadu. For whose freedom
had the revolution been won, been lost?
Batnaffas huriyya: breathing freedom. Day or night,
I could always buy bread. With unlit candles,
bowing my head over a steaming plate,
I heard the river exploding over its dam.
Revolution: thawra. Justice: adala.
I strike a match.
TRADITION
A circle of arms braided around shoulders—
three brothers weep, their bowed heads
the dark center of a flower.
In the other photo, the men hold upright
their father’s limp body
as if he’s standing in the center
of their embrace.
The brothers’ pinched, shining faces
search empty heavens.
One man’s mouth opens as if singing
or working to breathe. Later, he says
to the photographer: We call
to rescue soul. A man who cannot
cry is not trusted by the village.
THE KING’S TAXES
The morning after the news broke
we woke to a black-and-white
front-page photo of the King encased
alone in his black limousine, brooding
engraved in his mask of a face.
Those who recalled when history
in the making was monochrome
did a double-take. Watergate
broke in black-and-white. History
keeps living us.
SHE READS THE NEWS
like a letter from an old friend in trouble. Reads in bed, waiting
on a park bench, waiting for a train,
on the terrace of a café. Reads not knowing
what to do but bring a dish for the wake.
Like one silenced by rumor
of a neighbor’s story, terrified
it could be her own. Like the mother,
helpless with rage, reading the report of a daughter’s rape. Telegrams
from an ancient war that never stops. Lost letters from the future. Scripture,
fortune, parable, psalm.
Children stare back
as if the photographer might save them.
MOONLIGHT ON THE ROCKS
Grimacing, he held the newspaper
in one hand, a bedside lamp his only light. Sitting up, serious, he studied the page shot through with amber.
I wish I could go back, ask him, Dad, what are you reading? Why the face? What tastes so bitter? His tight jaw haunts, though he never aimed his rage at me.
Just a kid, I didn’t ask.
His hand shook slightly, picked up a glass. He drank moonlight
on the rocks. Not knowing
I’d never see Dad again, I’d gone out with a boy, as if I had time.
If I could go back, I’d not have left my father’s side.
Instead, I got to be a teenager
dancing under the stars, a girl on a date with a father waiting up for her
that one night.
THE GIFT
The old man’s wide-brimmed hat is home
to a plastic menagerie in a jungle of felt-covered plums and real roses. Every night, the Hat Man stands
on that Chelsea corner selling roses while admiring the woman with a crown of thick, coiled braids
making tortillas in a restaurant window. Sitting next to her in the window, I watch as she sweats, smiles, presses, peels, and gently tosses another tortilla into the air
where it seems to hover above her hands.
The Hat Man sends a boy to deliver a long-stemmed red rose which she places on a shelf under her work table
next to my daughter who reaches for the cellophane-wrapped flower and stuffs her tiny hand inside the hard, clear tube
just as the woman glances down, winks,
and tosses another tortilla. My girl turns to offer me gifts: two pale fists, her beaming little face. Under her hands,
I place my palms into which she dumps wrinkled crimson petals.
Lo siento, I say to the woman who nods
while handing a tortilla to Sophie who turns to grin
at a suited man with dreads watching us from the sidewalk.
He turns to his wife—her index finger pierces the air, determined to direct a gaggle of tourists—and hands a bill to the Hat Man who offers a long-stemmed red rose to his wife,
aligning it with the rail of her arm and pointing finger.
ARRIVALS
Near midnight, we guard that final gate. In clumps, duets, and solos, we flank edges of the blank exit ramp,
that gray river. Like love, waiting is an action. A calculation of risk.
An exercise in longing. We study vaulted ceilings, cell phones, each other, the empty promenade
where those we call ours should be walking toward us.
I remember a dinner with my wife—
surrounded by Japanese Maple and palms in a tea house,
we first saw the words
Ichi Go Ichi E.
This meeting—one chance.
A brown boy dangles a handmade, floppy banner at his side. “Welcome Home Mom” curls
at its edges to read “come home.” His white father checks his watch,
mumbles to the dark brown girl whose fist anchors silver and blue metallic balloons floating above their heads.
A passenger arrives. Then another, followed by a parade of drained faces.
Vacant eyes spark
and widen—that instant of recognition—the path between two bodies suddenly visible.
The metallic balloons bob
and the boy hoists dancing words
above his head. A Black woman embraces the boy, the girl, the man
each for about seventeen seconds when, finally, my wife walks toward me. This arrival— this chance.
Chivas Sandage is the author of Hidden Drive (Antrim House), a finalist for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year Awards in poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Salmagundi, Southern Humanities Review, and Texas Observer, among others. She is a digital columnist at Ms. Magazine and her column, “Ms. Muse,” features contemporary feminist poets and their work. As an assistant professor at Westfield State University, Sandage taught composition and literature. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Bennington College. The Massachusetts Cultural Council’s 2020 Artist Fellowship Program awarded Sandage a $1,500 artist grant as a finalist for her work on a nonfiction book, The Wind Blew Through Us: Love, Murder, & Justice in Texas. Poet Ilya Kaminsky awarded the title poem of Sandage’s unpublished second poetry collection, Summertime in America, as a finalist for the Georgia Review’s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. She was a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and the 2017 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye chose her work for an award and publication as a runner-up for the 2017 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Chivas lives with her wife in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and San Marcos, Texas.