“The Jumblies: An Elegy,” by Daisy Fried

Poetry faculty member Daisy Fried was recently featured in At Length. Read an excerpt of Fried’s poem “In Her Room. My Mother is Dead.” below:

The Jumblies
An Elegy

3. In Her Room. My Mother is Dead.

In her room with the blackened light,
what the girl sings:
And the ship the black freighter
disappears out to sea
and on it is me
then switches off from Blitzstein/Brecht to Edward Lear:
And everyone cried, ‘you’ll all be drowned!’
royal blue rubber glove drowning
her hand, singing now and turning poem
to slow low blues. She sings when interested
and happy. They called aloud ‘Our Sieve ain’t big.
But we don’t care a button
we don’t care a fig in a sieve we’ll go to sea.‘
What she does: slides the screen off the top of the tank.
Far and few far and few are the lands where the Jumblies live
slow jam slows Their heads are green
and their hands are blue and they went to sea in a sieve.
What Heather does: smites head at the girl’s blue finger.
And mouse: spreads Heather’s maw.
What glove does: when the girl flings it, hangs deflated
over the trash can edge.
Weather: sultry summer.
Windows: up.
Cat: spreads its little knives against the snake tank.

Read the poem in its entirety, as well as another, here: http://atlengthmag.com/poetry/two-poems-8/