Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: As a prose writer, I’ve spent the last year at The Cincinnati Review absorbing all I can from poets Lisa Ampleman (managing editor) and Caitlin Doyle (associate editor) about what makes a poem tick. When I find myself drawn to a poetry submission, I often call Caitlin over to take a second look. We discuss rhythm, imagery, voice, narrative, and theme. Still, when I find a poem that really resonates with me, I often struggle to pinpoint the complex craft at work behind the scenes. This is true of Uma Menon’s “trusting the birds,” a poem that is both abstract and concrete, that gestures at a much larger narrative while grounding itself in a short closed-off scene. Something monumental has shifted in the speaker by the poem’s end, but the images and meaning remain ephemeral: “the cloth will make/for good nesting material.”
trusting the birds
it is raining outside when Amma
runs out of clothespins: the wind,
unforgiving in its embrace, blows
a cave into a wet sari better than
moth holes i tell myself when
a black kite turns to soot & it’s
just a bird there is a clothespin
at the end of each of its talons but
they latch only on to
aren’t you afraid
Amma tells the story of the dress
that flew away with so much air
in the pockets & i can’t help but
think of the birds carrying away
my shawl when the trees are
all gone, split into wood to make
clothespins the cloth will make
for good nesting material it is
still raining here so Amma & i
become clothespins clutching
afghan blankets between our nails
Uma Menon is a fifteen-year-old writer from Winter Park, Florida. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, and National Poetry Quarterly, among others. Her first chapbook was published in 2019 (Zoetic Press); she also received the 2019 Lee Bennett Hopkins Award in Poetry.
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