FROM THE
Horse’s Mouth a conversation, with Bryana Joy, about the hidden power of the letter “O” and the auditory space we grant birds. IHLR: Thank you for talking to us about your winning poem, “Summer of the Oystercatchers.” We’re so happy to have the opportunity to expand upon your genesis statement. We feel like many will read this poem and recognize the current state of the world—all of the loss and our anxiety in the losing. How do you feel current events informed this poem and will perhaps continue to inform our reading of it? JOY: Although this piece doesn’t reference current events in any direct way, it is from start to finish a pandemic poem, and I always think of it as such. It’s easy to forget, I think, the eeriness—the quality of horror—that was so much an element of those early pandemic days. In England, where my husband Alex and I were living at the time, the world seemed to fall almost completely still for months. Grocery store aisles were bare, and businesses were hastily shuttered and deserted with promotional signs still dangling in the windows. It was a startlingly apocalyptic scene. Surgeries, cancer treatments, and other quite serious health procedures had to be suspended. I recall stepping out for a walk on campus one evening and not hearing so much as a single automobile. What’s more, folks were enduring unusually traumatic separations from loved ones. In Italy, bodies were piling up outside the morgues, and people were stuck in quarantine with the corpses of family members. All over the planet, couples were dying in isolation without being allowed to
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