From the Throat of Crows by Erica Manto Paulson

From the Throat of Crows

by Erica Manto Paulson

She circled the date she would wrap her car around a tree in blue eyeliner

on her wall calendar, a question mark scrawled inside the box. Everyone

was talking at the funeral about how she knew her day was coming— the closed

casket and the people in her hometown who preferred to think of lesser things.

Her mother recalled how she could feel the storms coming as a child, counting

the miles between lightning and thunder until they shortened into rain.

Summers, she plucked the exoskeletons of cicadas off the elms to peer through

the spaces they left behind. Where great old barns buckle at the knees,

fields receive what is left of the living into cathedrals of cirrus clouds

and corn. Milkweed seeds, engorged within the shell, remind where

we will suckle from the earth again. On that clear, summer day her body

spirited through the windshield like she had broken free and came to rest

beside the collapsing rafters of an old calving barn, her breath fluttering

into the wind like a butterfly, her laughter emerging from the throat of crows.

This poem, published in Slippery Elm in 2021, has stayed with me since I first read it.

Besides the sadness and the underlying hint of the supernatural in the main narrative, the poet has strong images throughout the poem, images that evoke the Midwestern prairies. These two components play off one another in this poem, creating both beauty and a bit of mystery.

Even before the first line, which really pulls the reader in, is the title. When I open a journal's table of contents, I go for the titles that are interesting, and this one is. I immediately wanted to know what is coming from crows. And why the throat?

The blue eyeliner in the first line is a wonderful specific detail. For me, it signaled a young person, someone in her late teens or in her 20s.

The second stanza provides a bit of commentary on the small minds in the small town. Then we are back to this sense of the supernatural (perhaps extra-natural would be more accurate here), feeling the coming of storms. The fourth couplet provides more information on the dead woman, and then we have two sentences over four lines that truly ground us in the Midwest. It also gives the poet the chance to remind us that we will all "suckle from the earth again." Wonderful image!

We return to the car accident with a great metaphor--"through the windshield like she had broken free." The image it produced in my head was troubling, of course, but very vivid.

The line break at that stanza break--"came to rest"--is very good. We use "rest" when talking of death--being laid to rest, rest in peace/power--and here it is being used on someone who is dying. A clever line break.

The last couplet gives us birth beside the woman's death in the form of a barn where calves are birthed. The animal associations continue. The woman's dying breath is like a butterfly and the poem ends by giving us the explanation for the mysterious title--the crows are laughing with her/for her. And why the laughter? Because "she knew her day was coming." The question mark on the calendar meant she did not know how she would die--the laughter at the end is not joyful, just sardonic and knowing.

Read this poem in Slippery Elm here and I encourage you to read the rest of the issue as well--it is a great issue filled with strong poems.