The Last Birthday Poem
Begged to rub the sting from his grandma’s missing legs,
a boy strokes the empty blankets
and sees her tilt her head, hears her soothed sigh
so even he begins to feel beneath his palms
the thighs that aren’t there, the knobs of the knees—
this is a thing that happens. Our brain’s map of the space
we flesh out with reflex and receptor includes the contours
of a body even when a body no longer fills them.
The trick wouldn’t work if the grandma were blind,
just as so much we taste is smell, and if you
plug your nose and bite a fruit held to your lips
you can’t tell apple from onion—though when at last
you inhale, expecting apple, the acrid spice
brines your eyes. I can’t promise this story will aid you
when you call a new lover an old lover’s name.
I can’t stop mixing up my children, calling one
while I fling the frisbee to the other. The world
is fact and misconstruction. We make it up
as we go, Cassandra and Agamemnon, Teflon and Revlon.
We go forward into the new year with the grid
of the old laid over it, buzzing with anniversaries
of strangers we were. It happens fast. If today
flowers appear, it won’t be my hands that gather
them. The man you’re with now knows you better
than anyone I’ve been could. It’s over so soon,
you wonder how long you’d strummed the quilt
someone’s grandmother made, whose legs you were
meant to be feeling, how many years they’ve been gone.
__________
Scott Beal
Review by Colleen S. Harris
I sat with this poem for a good long while, as good poems ask you to do. This piece is a beautiful meditation on absence—the grandmother’s legs, the lovers we separate from, the gap between synapses as we look at one and call the other. Other poems have attempted to grasp at absence, but I think the reason this one is so successful is the punch and the universality of the images chosen: an absent limb, the punch of onion when hoping for apple, a parent swapping children’s names (who of us has not laughed at a parent doing this?). These are all things the reader can identify with, viscerally, without formal training or reaching too hard, and allow the reader to really absorb the poem. I found this poem a stunningly effective way to describe loss.
Review by John Garmon
These poems take me by surprise, turn me around, and make me pay attention. I suspect Scott Beal is a veteran poet. If not, he’s been hiding out somewhere in northern Montana, waiting for readers to ask, “Why is he so elusive?” His lines are demanding, his people in his poems are real, and his pacing/rhythm marks him as an accomplished poet. His poetry is both inspirational and compassionate. His characters are like unforgettable people in novels or movies or real life. His poetry is taken from authentic experiences. I like his honesty, his conservative style, and his original way of writing memorable lines, “The man you’re with now knows you better than anyone I’ve been could.”
Review by Paul Ilechko
The first of Scott’s three birthday poems, and definitely my favorite of the set, this piece traverses a huge amount of ground in a mere 28 lines. Beginning with a boy who rubs his grandmothers missing legs, it traverses the psychology of how the brain understands space, the curious intersection of taste and smell, and the common human frailty of calling loved ones by someone else’s name, before returning to the grandmother “whose legs you were meant to be feeling, how many years they’ve been gone”. In passing we glimpse hints of a relationship gone wrong, and the narrator replaced in their former lover’s emotions by a man who “knows you better than anyone I’ve been could.”
So much here focuses on absences – the grandmother who has lost her legs, the loss of taste when scent is not available, the inability to distinguish between Teflon and Revlon. But underlying all of it is the absence of love, and all that follows in terms of defining a person’s humanity.
Review by Zeke Sanchez
All three of Scott Beal’s poems are high achievements. However, I can only offer comments on “The Last Birthday.”
“The world is fact and misconstruction. We make it up as we go,” and so the poet crystalizes what he meant when he said he stroked his mother’s missing legs (amputated?) and that she responded with moans. The legs used to be there. By habit a lot of things in our lives “used to be there” and aren’t anymore. But we go on reconstructing our lives. Clearly there is a lot more to Scott Beal’s lovely poem. There is also something of T.S. Eliot in the poem, echoes from the 1920’s, which is, in my opinion, a good thing.
From Eliot’s The Song of J. Afred Prufrock,
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
— somehow I related Profrock’s missing hair, the bald spot, to Grandma’s missing legs. It’s odd, but there it is.
Really enjoyed this poem.
Review by Jared Pearce
I like how the poem begins with such a tender moment—how we work to alleviate the suffering of others—and then, as it continues, reveals how little alleviation we can really offer, how little we can really receive. Yet the poem is not dark or sorrowful, but truthful, hard, real, likeable, and worrisome.
Review by Nancy Christopherson
Phantom limbs, mythological characters, rhythm and rhyme. Some folks deny that we grow wings through the years, that our souls evolve into better beings if we let them. Indeed the world is fact and misconstruction and we make it up as we go. Daily life, while forgetting our children’s names, mixing up pets’ names, still calling out to them in the park. I like how this poem invites me to collect my thoughts and my memories into the sweet pages I call life. What we all share here on earth. I feel welcome in these lines. “I recognize you”, this poem reports to its reader as its author leaps cross boundless space and time into the sweet hope and promise of today.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Le bugie hanno le gambe corte. (Lies have short legs, meaning, they don’t get far – Italian proverb.)
Well, now we know proverbs do not always get it right; lucky for us, I might add.
It feels apt to open this issue of our online poetry journal with such a piece. Deception, trickery, falsehood: these are not mere accidents of language, but signatures of a deeper programming, something inscribed within us and probably lifesaving. Here we are, in this, which is not just any poetry journal, not one of those places where poems appear only to vanish, forgotten, as soon as the editor pastes them into a file. In here contributors are invited to read one another with care, to respond, to question, to encounter. To prod one another, to ask not only what the poem says, but what it stirs, what it awakens.
In a sense, here we too reach out through the invisible, the nonexistent, the fiction of our appendages. Massaging the phantom limb (scars included) that each poem conjures, revives, keeps warm under its blanket, we could swear we are witnessing that lost part of ourselves moving again in the world, newborn. Empty blankets that only we can feel moving, wriggling, pulsating with life. It’s a true joy to be here.
Review by William Welch
I really enjoy how Beal presents absence in this poem. The image of the boy trying to his ease grandmother’s phantom pain is an excellent metaphor for how we cope with the different kinds of loss we encounter throughout life. It’s an odd remedy—this massage of nothingness, the missing remainder, which must be watched to be felt. I will be thinking of the implications this poem calls forth for a long time.