Tattooed Poets Project: Traci Brimhall

Today's tattooed poet is Traci Brimhall, who shares this single word with us:

Traci explains:

"I got my tattoo last April during the Little Grassy Literary Festival at Carbondale, IL. I was in Carbondale to do a reading from my first book, when I got the email that my second book had been accepted. I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, something both wild and permanent, and there was a poet and tattoo artist, Ruth Awad, at the dinner table who offered to give me my first ink. I spent that night celebrating in Ruth's kitchen getting my first tattoo.

I chose the word Duende, a word the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca said represented "a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought." A guitar maestro had once explained it to him this way: 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' When people ask me to explain it, I usually say it's an art that asks you to do battle with what is darkest in you, and what comes out is already baptized by black sounds."

Here is the poem Traci selected for us to read:

Aubade with a Broken Neck

The first night you don’t come home 
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough 
with dirt. The dog finds me and presents 
between his gentle teeth a twitching 
nightjar. In her panic, she sings 
in his mouth. He gives me her pain
like a gift, and I take it. I hear 
the cries of her young, greedy with need, 
expecting her return, but I don’t let her go
until I get into the house. I read 
the auspices—the way she flutters against 
the wallpaper’s moldy roses means 
all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling
means a storm approaches. You should see 
her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing 
at the starless window, her body a dart, 
her body the arrow of longing, aimed, 
as all desperate things are, to crash 
not into the object of desire, 
but into the darkness behind it.