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    Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible
    Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible
    Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible
    Ebook173 pages1 hour

    Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

    By Rebecca Lindenberg

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    About this ebook

    Living in landscapes of ruin and ruination, memory and problematic nostalgia, Rebecca Lindenberg’s Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible plumbs the depths of disruption, decay, and how we go on when the world stops cold. Inspired by the speaker’s experiences of living with type 1 diabetes, the collection chronicles humanity’s daily fight for survival in a world that’s bent on destroying itself.

    Lindenberg centers love, self-acceptance, and intimacy as incomparable balms across great geographical and psychological distances, and asks the reader to do the impossible: hope.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateOct 1, 2024
    ISBN9781960145307
    Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible

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      Book preview

      Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible - Rebecca Lindenberg

      I.

      To My Insulin Pump

      You’re part of my anatomy now – port,

      they call it. Into the flesh of my belly,

      I insert a needle. Needle comes out, but

      a tiny plastic capillary remains, affixed

      to a button. Buoy on the surface of me.

      Black, about the size of an old pager,

      I wear you clipped to my bra like a spy.

      When delivering insulin, I can hear and feel

      a faint click-whir, click-whir near my heart,

      a cat’s purr. Fine plastic tubing runs from

      my pump to my button. Somehow

      umbilical. It unclasps with a quick twist

      if I want a bath. Or to fuck unobstructed.

      It would not be exaggerating to say you

      (weight of a deck of cards, cost of a small car)

      are literally keeping me alive – but I’ll just say

      you, splendid little engine, are the only part

      of me I never find it difficult to love.

      A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse

      for Chris

      Worlds just keep on ending and

      ending, ask anybody who survived

      an earthquake in an ancient city

      its people can’t afford to bolt

      to the bedrock, or lived to testify

      to the tyrant who used his city’s roofs

      like planks to walk people off,

      his country’s rivers like alligator pits

      he could lever open and drop a whole

      angry nation into. Ask anyone

      who has watched their own ribs emerge

      as hunger pulls them out like a tide,

      who watched bloody-sheet-wrapped

      bodies from the epidemic burn,

      or fled any forever-war.

      The year I was eleven, I felt

      the ground go airplane turbulent

      beneath me. Its curt shuddering

      brought down a bridge and a highway

      I’d been under just the day before.

      And I was not afraid, but should have been

      the first time love fell in me like ash.

      How could I know it would inter us

      both, how could I not? The world

      must, I think, keep ending

      so long as we keep failing

      to heed the simple prophecies of fact –

      industry’s thick breath fogs our crystal ball,

      war is a trapdoor sprung open in the earth

      that a whole generation falls through

      and love ends, if no one errs, in death.

      When my love died, I remember thinking

      this happens to people every day,

      just – today, it’s my world

      crashing like an unmanned plane

      into the jungle of all I’ve ever

      come to know, but didn’t want to.

      It feels terrible to feel terrible

      and so we let ourselves forget –

      Why else would we let the drawbridge

      down for a new tyrant, water

      the Horseman of Famine’s red steed

      with the last bucket from the well?

      But we forget to give up, too. A heart

      sorrow-whipped and cowering

      will still nose out to its ribcage

      to be petted, will still have an urge

      for heroics. And anyway, when has fear

      of grief actually kept anyone from harm.

      Some hope rustles in my leaves

      again. It blows through, they eddy

      the floors of me, unsettling

      all I tried to learn to settle for.

      Would I be wiser to keep

      a past sacrament folded in my lap

      or would I be more wise to shake

      the gathered poppies from my apron,

      brush off soft crimson petals

      of memory and be un-haunted –

      I don’t know. So I choose you and we

      will have to live this to learn what happens.

      And though it’s tempting to mistake

      for wonders the surge of dappled

      white tailed does vaulting through

      suburban sliding glass doors,

      they are not. Nor vanishing bees

      blown out like so many thousands

      of tiny candle-flames, neither

      the glinting throngs of small black birds

      suddenly spiraling out of the sky,

      the earth almost not even dimpling

      with the soft thuds of feathered weight.

      They’re not wonders, but signs

      and therefore can be read. I didn’t

      always know that in the ancient Greek

      apocalypse

      means not the end of the world but

      the universe disclosing its knowledge

      as the sea is meant to give up its dead,

      the big reveal, when the veil blows back

      like so many cobwebs amidst the ruins

      and all the meaning of all the evidence

      will shine in us to finally see –

      And there you’ll be. And I’ll know you

      not by the moon in your grin but the song

      rung in my animal self. For I feel you,

      my sure-handed one, with something

      sacreder than instinct but just as fanged.

      Then unharness me the way you know

      I want so I can watch the stars

      blink back on over the garden as we grapple

      in the dimming black like little, little gods.

      The Woodpecker

      Last night at dinner, my husband told the children

      the cat had left a red-bristled woodpecker at the door

      still heaving her small breast, still blinking a bright eye.

      He told them he got his gloves, gently lifted her up,

      that she perched for a bit on his finger, frightened

      tiny talons gripping and ungripping, until she finally

      found her wings and flew off. Did you know, I asked,

      this weird fact about woodpecker’s tongues? I let

      their father explain (because he’s the one who told me)

      that woodpeckers’ tongues wrap around their brains –

      a fact so strange and obviously metaphorical it really

      deserves its own poem. But this isn’t that poem because

      a few nights earlier, my husband and I were talking

      about poems and he suggested I should really write

      a poem about this pandemic we’re in. The problem is

      I have nothing to say about this pandemic we’re in.

      If I get sick, I’m one of those people they say it kills.

      I saw a political ad in which a lone bed sat in a lone room,

      ventilator noises. It

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