A Kite in Wind: Julia Cohen’s Triggermoon Triggermoon (a review)

Imagine this perfectly windy day. There is a kite, the most perfect kite. And we are on a perfect grassy slope, looking down a clean run, a lack of trees as a runway. We want to burst, kite string in hand, wind lifting those wings and its hollow bones. But the string beneath our kite, it has birthed itself a tangle of white, an unspooled ream of loops. The wind will not last and the mass of string seems a doable challenge, so we drop to your knees, to the lawn, and begin feeding lines through lines.

from ‘The History of a Lake Never Drowns’:

We fished for porcelain, traded childhood wampum in shards of blue

Summer thunder levitated a tiny body in bed

Your head, tender poppy, white-shaped lung tired like a sinner

watching the sun go down

Think how many little words have passed by & not noticed you

The dock a xylophone you dove from

Julia Cohen’s Triggermoon Triggermoon is this kite. Cohen’s poems have these lithe and beautiful shapes, moments that in our hands we want to see flying. We picture, in their shiny surfaces, their open spaces, the sky against poetic skin, the way these poems are unleashed from ground, relinquished towards the perpetual transformation of clouds.

from ‘Hello Pedestrian, I Hope’:

it’s not too wind-torn

out there—these shutters are

just for show. You have

the warmest bones I’ve ever

met. The woodpile is dwindling

while my androgyny is a perfect

child that cannot stack.

And Triggermoon Triggermoon is also the string pooled beneath the kite, flopped down in seemingly hassled impasses, tendered back and upon itself, infinitely playing out. These poems are work to be done, both a praise of down-on-knees for how they are written and the workload of crouching to investigate, to unstring lines from lines.

from ‘No Bravery in the Night Room’:

What scares me most is that what I fear is already here & I don’t

know it yet I’m also afraid that if it happens

you won’t be imaginative enough to know where I went I do not

worry about the ghosts with them good & evil doesn’t apply

I have no bravery for the night in my daylight hours are stoic &

invincible I feel prepared

& eager I have ten eyes ten hands

My closet holds my clothes the forest my animals

When we shut our eyes they are actually still open only

covered by a lid I say these lines uncomplicated so that I may

eventually sleep

Cohen is not the flyer of this kite, we are. As readers engaged in Triggermoon Triggermoon we are asked to wield her beauty in our skies, to judge the wind and work out our tangles. Cohen’s poetry is not to be swallowed – it is to be sipped, relished, savored – and we are expected to work on her poetry until we find those two finite ends. Then we will tie one to kite and one to our wrist, letting go, watching blue between perfectly carved spaces, a kite of words floating up.