CHAGALL’S “THE POET WITH THE BIRDS” by Jessica Cuello

by Jessica Cuello / Tuesday, 14 November 2023 / Published in ISSUE 28

The man dreams under the tree. Or is he dead.

My students can never agree. How sealed is

that scene. Peaceful but sealed and the birds

are cut out. Their outlines remain but they

have fled. How to be free. That is what

the man dreams, folded arms, ankles crossed.

When I was a nanny, the girl and my hands

smelled of the soap the family used. They

always fed me and when I used that soap

years later, her tiny cheeks returned to me,

rising skyward on the swing. In the Chagall,

the sky is smudged with blue and the poet

seems to gaze upward, but his eyes are wells

of black that look inward at loss. If you don’t have

someone in a time like that you don’t have family.

Then you covered me in clean sheets. We watched

La Strada together before we never talked again.

You hummed along when the fool played his violin,

and once in the dark you put your hand on my side

to say, That’s old. It isn’t here now. There were no violins

in my childhood school. My mom rented a trumpet

for my brother and when it went unpaid someone

knocked on the door and took it away. Everything

has a purpose, says the fool, even this pebble.

I never cried when I left home. But, my friend,

for three years I cried if I said your name.

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About Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, and a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.