Jamie Lyn Bruce | In the sky there are explosions, in your heart there is the sky

Jamie Lyn Bruce received her MFA in Poetry from City College of New York. Her work has previously appeared in journals including Rust + Moth, Alyss, Day One, and Thin Air, among others. She currently resides in Rochester, New York where she works as a special education teacher in the Rochester City School District. She is interested in the ways that poetry can serve students, inspire a love for reading, and a passion for written word, particularly for students struggling with reading comprehension.

Also by Jamie Lyn Bruce: Where Snowmelt Lifts Baptism

April 2019

Jamie Lyn Bruce

In the sky there are explosions, in your heart there is the sky

Trace the road-lines with your fingers. Remember their bend, the way they spread like veins to the coast. Remember your heart, the way it aches at the sound of her name. Remember winter, patches of snow collected on her coffin, bone-white and still. What words are left for empty? See: three cities, two coasts. Erase their names, hers, your own. Deconstruct every surface. Take apart maps and draw them again. Remember the backshore, strips of flat coast laid out like our bodies beneath sand, heat pressed between our toes. Remember her laughter, eyes-wide, a million anxious colors exploding in the sky.

This piece was born from trauma, from a fear of loss so large it took over my living. The year my mother almost died I spent chasing impulses, indulging the worst parts of myself, simply getting by. I wrote the same thing over and over: pieces of poetry around love and around death. The loss of the person I couldn’t stand the thought of losing. As if writing it down, I might be able to control it. In my head, I created this narrative — this disjointed story of love, romantic and familial, that I could never fully finish. This poem was born of that narrative. I really don’t know what else to speak to: the action of this poem in particular is reminiscent of what I myself was doing through the act of writing this loss — writing her death, and bringing her back, only to write her away again. It was a way to cope. A way to avoid the memory of the harsh lights of the ICU, the sterile smell of the hospital, the rainy ride there, terrified of what I would find when we arrived. In a way it is a memorial for a woman who is not lost, not yet, thank God.

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