everything has become birds: poems

By Peter Grandbois and Judy Gilats

The history of our relationship with mental illness is the history of silence. Everything Has Become Birds is an attempt to change that. For centuries the mentally ill have either been locked up, driven out of cities and towns by whip and lash, sterilized, lobotomized, and euthanized. The catalogue of horrors rivals the worst of humanit

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighthorse Books
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781944467326

Peter Grandbois

Peter Grandbois is the award-winning author of eleven previous books. His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in over one hundred magazines and been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best American Horror. His plays have won the Best of the Neil LaBute Festival and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.

Book preview

everything has become birds

poems

Peter Grandbois

Also by Peter Grandbois

The Three-Legged World

Half-Burnt

Kissing the Lobster

This House That

The Girl on the Swing

The Glob Who Girdled Granville and the Secret Lives of Actors

Wait Your Turn

Domestic Disturbances

Nahoonkara

The Gravedigger

The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir

Copyright © 2021 by Peter Grandbois All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Brighthorse Books 13202 North River Drive Omaha, NE 68112

ISBN: 978-1-944467-26-5

Cover Art © Rob Clayton

Brighthorse Books is a small literary press based in Omaha, Nebraska, publishing books of poetry, short fiction, and novels.

For information about Brighthorse Books, visit us on the web at brighthorsebooks.com. For information about the Brighthorse Book Awards, go to https://brighthorsebooks.submittable.com/submit. Brighthorse books are distributed to the trade through Ingram Book Group and its distribution partners.

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Contents

Epigraph

1. Antiquity

Black angel

There is no shepherd but silence

(cont’d)

Against the broken stone

The biggest problems come from being

The road out is like the road in

Somewhere hidden

2. The Middle Ages

A candle lit in the hollow of a wall

What certain voice

This is how you become absent

A dark and private weather

That winged and sacred thing

The crowd in the mind

That we might come back whole

Aglow, in silence

This creature

As if the night had not begun

(cont’d)

3. The Renaissance

Flies in summer

This imagined world

In waning light

(cont’d)

In every heart, a mouth

Absence

These distracted things

This small knowing

The sting of the finite

A different kind of dark

Waking

(cont’d)

4. The Enlightenment

After the leaves fall, the black birds lift one by one

Too much world to hold

The dredging

[I’m convinced I’m never awake]

The cut of feathers

Song of water and earth

(cont’d)

All hunger and thumbs

Whose body is not torn

To sing and begin again

This void

Into isn’t

All that we remember is wind

5. The Nineteenth Century

Stealing fire

With its mouth full

(cont’d)

Tomb of words

The flower’s throat

Now daybreak comes

Backwards into being

Crossing over

(cont’d)

Through the keyhole

(cont’d)

Everything has a price

This hungry map

That old story

(cont’d)

6. The Modern Era

When the night sky blooms

Attention Woolworth Shoppers

All that remains

There are all sorts of violence

[And so I wake]

Room of windows

The wind is an ocean

All we wished to see

Dearest love

The gathering

(cont’d)

For whom you are suffering

(cont’d)

Acknowledgments

(cont’d)

About the Poet

Epigraph

We’re all mad here.

the Cheshire Cat

One

Antiquity

Those whom the gods destroy, they first make mad.

Euripides

Black angel

Madness begins as punishment. Saul punished after neglecting his religious duty,