American Poetry Review

Search

vol. 47 | no. 01

Brynne Rebele-Henry

Self-biography as a girl with no mouth

Let me be pure/let me be holeless

The safest girls are those who stay quiet

Saints would stitch their lips shut with black wire

I always said that one day I would be holy

I always said that one day I would be a swan

Mute and nothing but tar and lovely feathers

We used to mix vinegar with salt water

Gargle it to look for cuts inside our throats

I used to swab my own throat until I choked on the cotton

Once I coughed for so long my lungs fell out

Once I forgot how to speak

Once I became all stone

Once I was something not girl

Once I was a bird

Found In Volume 47, No. 01

Read Issue

Brynne Rebele-Henry

About the Author

Brynne Rebele-Henry’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Rookie, and So to Speak, among other places. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2016 Adroit Prize for Prose, and a 2017 Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner. Her first book Fleshgraphs appeared with Nightboat Books in 2016. Her second book, Autobiography of a Wound, won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019.

LOGIN