2023 Frontier OPEN Finalist: Halved Sonnets: A Diagram of Distances by Georgio Russell
Join us in celebrating this poem by Georgio Russell, one of our finalists of the 2023 Frontier OPEN!
Please stay tuned as we publish the rest of the finalists throughout the month of December.
Halved Sonnets: A Diagram of Distances
…all friendships capable of night, he understood
the empty house, the shadow in the eye…the crescent nail
scabbing away old loves..
—Dennis Scott
There on the vacant coast, a stone’s throw
from our stove, my father mastered his motion
for loneliness, pacing as he played his jazz
for divided prints, bodiless on the blaring sand—
my mother’s loneliness borrowed the face
of my father’s back (and forth) or the aimless
rides with radio tuned to remove our tongues,
brothers in the backjeep who couldn’t yet tell
where one’s life ended, and the other’s mortal
brown began — older, I noticed it reached far beyond
the yards we knew by sandal step, smearing the era
and moving thick as the loom of a hurricane,
through the archipelago, anthill cities abroad,
pill-numb pubs and muted Ubers. We did all possible
to guard our days from the gale, the room’s
gridded window from shatter, our Self ceilings
from collapse: and yet we kept the body’s door ajar
in case some streaming face peered in, craving
haven from the rain — how many of us became
that walker caught in downpour, looking for a house
whose mouth shouted here — I saw it in the queer
cousin crawling nights into the warmth
of his abuser’s bed, in all my peers performing
to reel their love online — I confessed it with a carousel
sex life, so much of me working to fill my valleys,
storming sweat as if to bridge the inch between
all touch — I heard a distance when my wife wheezed
her faith away on the final cot, the God she swore
would plumb her lung just a bubble in the IV bag.
I found it in our daughter, sleeping always
on her back to face their marshmallow heaven,
how she begged her mama’s mercy in the mornings
to learn she turned away. My own mother phones
either living son to say how shadowlike she feels,
the longing caustic in her creole, a slow stampede
pinging by her duplex panes, none of the herd
unstrange — she wants to know when we will we fly
home again, that it might cure the recurring dream
in which she hoards our lives inside her body like Russian
Dolls, a reverse birth bringing the house back to when
we brothers shared our borders, and none of these chats
ever seized a small fee. Our father gone for good still clings
to her till old jokes ooze — she’d padlock her ribs to keep
him in the cage, the ever-isle of herself, in which
my father, forever pendulum, paces post-divorce.
He believes that belonging is a sense. He believes
the lot of us impaired, opaque, unable to be entered —
Our lives collide, he claims, and say amen, that is all
they do, since even the absences result in wreck.
Georgio Russell
Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and an alumnus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is a past winner of the Peepal Tree Press Prize (2019), the Mervyn Morris Prize (2020), and The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2022/23). He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize 2022, and long-listed for the National Poetry Competition (2022) held by the Poetry Society. Russell was a featured poet for the British Council’s project, “Unwritten Poems: Exploring Caribbean Engagement in WW1.” His work has been published in Yolk Literary Magazine, PREE magazine, Frontier Poetry, The London Magazine, Magma and elsewhere. He currently lives in Brampton, Ontario, where he teaches English for Educate Academy. Some of his favourite poets include Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Ocean Vuong, Jane Hirshfield, and Roger Reeves.
