Lucie Brooks
The Globe Collection Speaks
For years, my home was a classroom or somewhere equally distinguished, like a library, back before Google Earth and Instagram. Before the woman found me at the antique mall and brought me home to sit atop her bookshelf, part of a collection. I used to have a lot to say. I’m quiet now, sitting still. But I remember fingers coaxing me to turn upon my axis. I speak the language of memory. I speak the language of forgetting. I tell the stories of old, made-up boundaries. Of places that used to exist but don’t anymore. The way things change. The way things take. There was a time when I was the way people explored the world. Sometimes, I whisper apologies for all the lies I’ve told. I remember the game children used to play, the one where they would give me a good spin and see where their finger landed as my rotations slowed, oceans waiting to swallow them whole. Sometimes, I whisper in a woman’s voice. I live in her daughter’s house now, atop a new bookcase. I connect them, a string made from the red cellophane equator peeling away from my middle. Mother to daughter. World to world. Forgetting. Remembering.
My Brother the Kinglet
Here are three facts about birds. The ruby-crowned kinglet is the second smallest bird in Kentucky. The first smallest is the ruby-throated hummingbird, which, if you think about it, could also be called the redneck hummingbird. The state bird is the cardinal. According to your daughter, cardinals are visitors from heaven. “My daddy sends birds to visit me,” she likes to say. You can have that fourth fact for free. I tell you all this to say there was a cardinal at my feeder yesterday. Also, two tufted titmice and a ruby-crowned kinglet I mistook for a hummingbird. For one bright second, I forgot. Forgot that summer is gone. Forgot you’ve been gone a year, too. A titmouse flew away. The other asked me, “Did you know his name means crown?” then he snatched a seed and flew back to the maple tree. Only the cardinal remained. “I don’t believe in visitors from the great beyond,” I told him. “It’s okay to take comfort,” he chirped back, “even in the things you don’t believe.”
Lucie Brooks
Lucie Brooks is a writer and educator. She grew up bouncing between rural Kentucky and Louisville, Kentucky, where she resides today. Her work examines family, place, the natural world, whiteness, and the opioid epidemic. You can read her in Taunt, Catapult, Manifest Station, and Pegasus. She is the 2022 winner of the Kentucky Poetry Society Chaffin/Kash poetry prize.