Julia Story is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande Books), the chapbook The Trapdoor (dancing girl press), and the chapbook Julie the Astonishing (forthcoming in March 2019 from Sixth Finch Books). She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her recent work can be read in Sixth Finch, Tinderbox, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is a Midwesterner who now resides in Massachusetts.
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A Brief Statement about Textual Difficulty
The poems I am working on now are based on the life of Christina the Astonishing, the 12th-century saint who came back to life at her own funeral and then spent the rest of her days living in trees and towers, as she had rejected heaven and had chosen instead to return to earth for a life of suffering. As I write these poems, some of which are her (the “her” is a character called Julie rather than Christina) letters to Jesus about her chosen life on earth, I find them getting smaller and smaller–the poems themselves are small, but the images too diminish as Julie spends her life erasing herself, or as already erased. Living on the edges of things and people, her experiences (and even her prayers) can be best documented in fragments.
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A Folio of Poems by Julia Story
Poems from Julie the Astonishing
How She Would Return from the Dead.
The body brought out like empty wood,
silent as a dark whale in dark water.
The body a citadel in trees: getting there was
land-swimming, pushing aside loneliness,
a white man in rubber boots and all
his little dogs, the sun flashing in and out
like god’s face upon the water before
the invention of cardboard and radio
transmissions. And then the second before
she knew she was going to give it all up—
everything, all of it, until she was walking
down the road in the dark with lungs full
of the scattered, old-fashioned promises
of beginning again—the house
of her body would light up, the feet
marching as they had been instructed to do.
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My fugue state, but brittle.
Pieces of me broke off,
each one a little you.
That night we washed our
socks together in the hotel
sink then watched an old
Murder She Wrote. A blank
face as white as breaths on
the screen. I wept because
I knew it was my face.
Then together we went
into the painting of the ocean.
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We approach the defunct
nudist colony.
Worn chorus of evening
doves, no naked folks.
Every moment
an ossuary.
I’m a body.
You are dead
like the invisible
nudes. But you
walk with me.
The moon
mothered in clouds.
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As you know, I am no one’s
bride. And yet I belong to you
and you are like me, a suit
of armor made of mercury.
The creatures lilt and gambol
when they sense our hovering.
I am a wraparound porch
bound to my own heart
and you an afternoon
filled with street corners.
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The smaller I am, the easier it is
for people to dream of me.
I go into their heads like a seed,
planting my tiny doorway
and crudely through it come
these awful resurrections.
They gave me a homestead by a little lake,
rustling itself in the breeze.
But the land rustled up three corpses
by the end of winter.
How industrious this sadness is,
making its ramp into me every day.
Building its house and also its saw,
its level, its nails, and whatever
substance makes these walls.