ON SOUND and ELEGY FOR THE BABE THAT WAS AND NEVER WAS
ON SOUND
It is said we hear before we see. Our mother’s voices,
in utero, for example. It might be said that certain
sounds bring us alive & further, to be brought alive
could mean to be moved any which way: to break into
a sprint, to slacken, kneecap sunk in snow. Further
still: to return rearranged, heart in teeth or warbling in
the throat’s pulp. Which sounds bring you alive? For
me: rain pelting a tin roof. Horsehair droning across
two strings at once. The muddy tones between notes.
Arabic spoken or sung, my first & half-grown tongue.
ELEGY FOR THE BABE THAT WAS AND NEVER WAS
after MG
Today I’m riding
no hands down 6th street,
a fresh baguette & bouquet
of pussywillow shooting
velvet-tipped fireworks
from the basket bungeed
to my red-balloon bicycle,
this steel-boned steed
that has licked every wrinkle
& pockmark in the asphalt
of Holman Day Road,
a sagging & potholed road
named after a poet & after
whom a baby was also named,
briefly & forever, before being
lowered into the ground.
I never knew him but once
saw his mother dance
barefoot on the soft planks
of a wooden stage,
her feet’s silver arches flung
skyward as if lifted
by tiny hands hidden in the air.
She waltzed there with
a coat clasped to her chest,
belly still gasping
with the memory of the boy
she carried but couldn’t keep.
She twirled the empty jacket,
wrapping its blue suede
around her shoulders
like a beloved’s arms,
playing the sleeves,
working the harp strings,
pulling breath from
the accordion’s bellow
right beside her own lungs
which drew so deeply
from inside her sorrow pot.
& in her arms she rocked
the bodiless chest, spinning
this garment out only to reel
it back in, cradling what
would have been his head
cresting from the lovely
button-studded collar.
It was how she managed
to get even the cuffs
to reach for her,
how the jacket seemed
to love being her silken prince,
cape of fabric circling
her head like an angel,
curling around her neck,
keeping time with her hips’
liquid dip & swing.
In the final moments
she choreographed,
I could see the infinite
fingers of her child
beginning to clutch & gather
in her turning waist,
tugging her jeans & when
at last the curtain dropped
she hung the coat back
on its dangling hook, breath-
less again, the stage soaked
in darkness & I wept for
wanting to make a beauty
shimmy up from loss twisting
across the heart’s wooden floor,
gathering finally all of our bereft
coattails & lapels. For wanting
& you too, probably, to make
a symphony of every dead thing,
coaxing out the stinger with honey,
calling forth the beloved babe
who’s not here until here he is—
limbs starry as the pearl lined
branches in a pussywillow shrine,
here with me as I fly across town,
his goldfinch feathers sprouting
even now from my back.
About the Author
janan alexandra is the author of come from (BOA Editions, 2025). The recipient of support from Hedgebrook, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright program, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, janan was a 2025 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and won the 2023 Adrienne Rich Award for her poem “On Form & Matter.” She teaches at Indiana University and at the Monroe County Correctional Center, edits poetry at The Rumpus, and helps curate MONDAYS ARE FREE, a Substack collaboration between BFF poets Ross Gay and Pat Rosal.
