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the poet
Heather Quinn is an artist and poet living in California. She was a finalist in House Mountain Review's Annual Broadside Contest (2019), a semi-finalist in both Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry prize (2020) and Prometheus Dreaming's Unbound Competition (2019), and has featured in Palette Poetry's 'Poetry We Admire' column for Shroud with Lead Wing, published originally in Raw Art Review. Heather's work has appeared most recently in the New York Times, 42 Miles Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Ghost City Review, High Shelf Press, Inkwell Press, Kissing Dynamite Poetry and Burning House Press.
the poems
Kaddish for Grandma Irene
Her bony body is naked underneath a dress of translucent leaves. The knobs of her knees are burls of a willow tree. I place the paper cut-out of a blackbird on her left shoulder. In an open green field, we drink warm milk from cracked teacups painted with tiny yellow birds. She unknots the twine from a Rosenbloom’s cake box. I remember sugar cubes perfectly stacked in her silver caddy. Its delicate silver tongs. One lump or two, angelah? The way she would sing to me in Yiddish, Shlof, shlof, kindela. She was shaky, made of glass. I was a sparrow, terrified that even so small I might break her. Her heart pieced together with string saved from 1930s Pittsburgh, from that Hill District row house where seven children shared two bedrooms. All those socks and sweaters darned for her six younger siblings. All those beatings by her mother with a washboard or wooden spoon. Her father, the cantor, practicing for Shabbat service, Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu. At the Monroeville Mall she bought my first purse, flowered and pink with a gold clasp. Oy! It’s exquisite, kindela, she said. Tearing up, she pinched my blushed cheeks. In her leafy dress she is the green field, her white hair catching flecks of dusklight. From a phonograph, Billie Holiday’s voice scratches, I’ll be seeing you. Grandma closes her eyes and sings.
sparrow
i watched a fledgling sparrow fly
from its nest to its mother
no, let me begin again
it did not fly but landed
at my feet after it was propelled
from the tree in front of my childhood home
by a rock thrown by a gangly boy bigger older
the tree was painted with dry pigment
& rabbit skin glue
no, it grew of bark
& leaf but i reconstruct
the sparrow’s slippery skin
damp slickened feathers
its seedling heart visible
through translucent membranes
beak snapping open & closed
squawk with no sound
Munch’s Scream
i picked up the baby bird
held it like a damp lung in my hand
nursed it with water & seed
no, what really happened was dad
said we had to leave it or momma
sparrow would never return
we knew momma was off
building a new nest
the O of the baby’s beak
an alarm, until feathers
wings flattened
in shallow grass
like a fried egg
yet the sparrow lives
pecking
at my sternum, sipping
oxygen from my windpipe
clawing for its perch
the history of light:
a burning haibun
After Torrin A Greathouse
i examine the bones of an incandescent bulb, crystalline glass, base & socket, thin wiry v relic of winged light i remember being chased by a ghost from my bed to the landing crying out to dad his face cast in television lowlights he scooped me up, tucked me back in, kissed my forehead & clicked on the bedside lamp ghosts always disappear in the light, he said dad died months before my wedding day his wedding band bound to my wrist with satin ribbon i imagined him as we wrapped his & her bulbs in black velvet smashed the glass beneath our feet later we picked up the broken shards, crushed metal burned the remains in a fire pit sealed them in a mason jar tonight i shake the jar like a snow globe watch the ashes bloom into embers, into dad’s image as it flickers, a reel of celluloid lit by one struck match
//
i examine the bones of an incandescent bulb, crystalline glass, base & socket, thin wiry v relic of winged light i remember being chased by a ghost from my bed to the landing crying out to dad his face cast in television lowlights he scooped me up, tucked me back in, kissed my forehead & clicked on the bedside lamp ghosts always disappear in the light, he said
dad died months before my wedding day his wedding band bound to my wrist wi tesatin ribbon i imagined him as we wrapp hed his & her bulbs in black velvet smashed the glass beneath our feet later we picked up wroken asha s, crushed metal burned the remains in a fire pit sealed them in a mason jar tonight i sha r like a snowobe watch ashes bloom into embers, into dad’s image as it flickers, a reel celluloid lit by one struck match
//
bones of an iof winged light dad s face ca ghost
always before bound to my e d like a snow
he loom ins a s a reel ofcelllits c atch
Publishing credits
Kaddish for Grandma Irene (earlier version): Minnesota Review
(November 1st 2016)
sparrow: Prometheus Dreaming
the history of light: Cathexis Northwest Press
(October 1st 2020)