An Interview with Heather Cousins
Moving right along into our fourth online podcast–Straylight is pleased to publish an interview with poet Heather Cousins. The interview runs for about 40 minutes. Cousins discusses Something in the Potato Room, her first book of poetry.
To listen to the podcast click the Heather Cousins interview
Find out more about poet Heather Cousins,
read her poetry, or check out her reading schedule dates on her homepage.
from Something in the Potato Room, Part VI
His first word was
nrnnnn. Infantile. Lisped.
I clapped my hands and
brought down flash-
cards. Baseball. Fish.
Xylophone. Zebra. After
every new sound, I fed
him out of a jar of peanut
butter. Little nibbles from
my finger.
***
A cave of. Crumbling
brick work. A dirty. A
black. A boundless.
Inkilke. Hours. Days.
He was sprouting. Full
sentences. His body
blossomed like a tree.
Buds knotting bone.
“Look at the head of
your femur,” I pointed.
“It’s growing a flower.”
***
I asked him: when he
lived, how he died. I
asked him, my palms
melting-molting, if he
had seen God. He shook
his wibble-wobble head.
His new lips—puffed,
sticky—tacky-trembled.
“Beebah mmmbaaahhhh,”
he said.
***
The language may have
been tonal. Like Chinese.
The Dead Man’s Journal
I bought a journal at an auction:
an Excelsior diary smaller than my hand;
the cover is waxy cloth,
impressed and foiled—silver, gold, black,
bearing the image of a bouquet of flowers,
a butterfly with opened wings,
and if you lean in close—a small gold bee,
sharp body wearing to invisible.
On the inside is his name
in cursive, black ink,
the mix of hairline and bold strokes:
“William Eberhard, his Book,
Colon, Mich.”
In the journal, he records nothing
but work, lack of work, and weather:
January 2, 1884:
Cold and stormey
did not due enthing
January 24, 1884:
Very Cold did
not due enthing
April 15, 1884:
to day it rained
hard all day:
did not due enthing
I wind him up in a piece of cloth
and tuck him in the darkness
of my underwear drawer.
