Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems

By Tina Carlson

This debut collection explores the vestiges of war and the effects those can have on a family. Carlson excavates the personal experience of violence and abuse that follows a traumatized soldier home and also reveals veins of redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780826357809

Tina Carlson

Tina Carlson is also the author of Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems (UNM Press).

Book preview

War Is a Cradle

Light-Years

I claim a granite outcrop on the day we visit our mountain homesite.

The dirt is thick with flint and the air smells of sap.

The happy family eats sandwiches on a cliff,

makes plans to build under a luminous canopy of pines.

Below, plains steam in the afternoon heat.

Light-years away from our daily lives, we draw rooms on the ground.

Columbines in the kitchen, cool moss for a rug.

Covered in sap and grit, my brothers wrestle for space below in a gully.

My father sketches ideas on a pad. They are selling land cheap, he claims.

He found this plot on the canyon’s steep edge.

We feed our meat sandwiches to the squawking jays and bold squirrels.

My mother watches the sun set.

My father, a wild and rough architect, designs our future until it gets dark.

War Is a Cradle

Silence is born in a war high above an Italian village, in snow, on skis, hiding from the Germans. Because in some recent time your people were German too, you are not sure whom to kill. You find the enemy freezing to death in a cave, some months older than your seventeen years, eyes the same blue as the ice that melts on your boots.

War is wild and makes you forget the taste of meringue on your mother’s fingers after baking, or the warm brick of your home in summer.

You shoot him in the head and hold him afterward, his blood pooling in your lap. You keep his gun as a souvenir. You begin to hear his sisters singing in your head, and the branches you break sound like bones.

In the small makeshift hospital, they bathe you in cream because you have forgotten how to speak and cannot tell them your