Impossible Belonging by Maya Pindyck
FINALIST – NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
Maya Pindyck’s Impossible Belonging is a collection of elemental folklore conceived from the inside and outside of bodies and the yearnings that shape them. Diaspora is complicated by the Anthropocene in this prescient collection. Pindyck unpacks the stories we shake off to seek out our own paths as mothers, Americans, as artists, and sisters with urgency and hope. At the same time, Impossible Belonging honors those legacies through the tender utterances of these crystalline poems.
— Carmen Giménez Smith
Judge, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
“You have to touch the fire of letters,” writes Maya Pindyck in a startling collection of poems where we are forced to not look away from the war of language and its gouged field of bodies, blood, blossoms, and ideas. Here is the memory of a self and her home, bleakly dissonant as a war-stained country … Impossible Belonging is defiant, immediate. Beyond geographies of war, love, and words, Pindyck commands the past, present, and future: “Remember our country/banning the book noting/our refusal to see./Remember this compass/mapping our last past.” — Rachel Eliza Griffiths
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WITHOUT MY EYES I SEE
a train beneath the ocean
plane engines mimicking birds
real birds
cracking Morse code —
a truck heavy with deliveries
sprinklers doing their daily spray
more birds
climaxing in chorus
dots of furious song
despeckling
aria —
car honk
a sip of your water
leaves kissing the air &
there, a child’s voice: I want to play
the sunshine with my banjo.
I want to see how it goes.
BOY
Someone made the school a plaque
of names. I find the one I wanted
for my never-son: bronze prince
stirring a pond with all his brothers.
My family came here from a country
I am not allowed to visit
even though its spices fill my cabinet.
My other family never made it.
I once walked a field
covering their bodies. Wildflowers
& grasses. Here, the story of a line
of children shot in the schoolyard.
Here, Manek’s hairbrush shop.
What I can’t wrap my head around
is the story of the boy playing ball
by the hole where they hid —
how he ratted them out to a soldier.
I try to imagine how that boy
grew. To love his own
boys, only, playing hide & seek
in the sun? And is that boy’s boy
a boy who now trains to turn
a life lethal, to pull a trigger
out of fear, or rage, or duty?
I don’t know, but I think it’s the same boy
stammering history & now & here — boy
who waves in the night to be seen.