disclose

i am my sister. I am my brother./ I am my brother’s sister,/ I am my mother’s keeper./I hold the secrets..

The family connections in Cynthia Atkins’ IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE are intimate, both entwining and empowering the rich experience these poems convey. “I’ve faked it and faked it well./ I hear our ancestors yelling / from the mental ward of hell,” declares Cynthia Atkins near the start of IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE, a book that explores what it means when mental illness becomes close as blood. Family offers both comfort and disquiet. In these elegant, beautifully observed poems, Atkins considers the burden of being a daughter, a sibling, a mother, and-most of all-a poet charged with making sense of ‘indecipherable lists, ‘ of wars domestic and national, and of the fact that all of us are ‘born in a trick of love. following is sample Poem from the book.

 Liturgy  by Cynthia Atkins

Because the trees grew

into paper for words to write

down what there are no words for.

Because it wants to size you up

and then compels you to confess.

Because it likes to breathe up

against you on the couch,

but will never commit to meals

or absolutes. Because it has no

understanding and no excuse,

and it dares the understudy

not to show up. Because you need

to get out of the weather, where

too many secrets are revealed

in the rain. Because it knows

you need to explain, even when

your hands are clean.

Because it told you

to spit out your gum

when a taxicab is running.

Because years have proven

that each death leads to song.

Because it knows the flowers

will be of no use-the words will dream

up the phlox. Because it will always

want and want to name what can’t be named.

Because it knows you say one thing

and mean another. It knows you know better.

It is the greed inside your prayer.

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