Write About an Empty Birdcage

by Elaina M. Ellis

Overview

Write An Empty Birdcage is an unorthodox instruction manual for the broken hearted. Ellis sets out to trace the lineage of various personal disasters. These poems explicitly explore identity, queerness, Jewish heritage, and embodied femininity. They do so with a critique of power that blends humor, the mess of confession, and a reverence for tension.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935904298
Publisher:	Write Bloody Publishing
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	94
File size:	467 KB

About the Author

Elaina M. Ellis full-time writes, teaches, and produces poetry in Seattle. She is the founder of TumbleMe Productions, a vehicle for multi-media artistic collaborations. Ellis is published in print and online, including Push Magazine, Awaking Consciousness Magazine, and Muzzle Magazine, and has been featured as a performance poet on many local and national stages. She will earn a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2011.

Read an Excerpt

WRITE ABOUT AN EMPTY BIRDCAGE
by Elaina Ellis

Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about your ribcage after robbery. Use negative space to wind a song from the place on the dresser where a music box isn't. Write about the corners where the two of you used to meet. Draw the intersections, arrow to the sidewalk where her shoes aren't near yours.

Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about a hinged open jaw that is neither sigh nor scream. Use this to signify EXIT. Make sure to describe the teeth, the glint of metal deep down in the molars, the smell of breath after lack of water. Make sure to draw this mouth a thirsty and human portrait of what it means to be used up. Write about voice by writing about how it feels when it's painful to swallow. If you must put noise in the scene make it the sound of bird wings flapping in a cardboard box. Show us an empty cage and give us the sound of confinement.

Take hope and fold it small as seed, then suck on it, slow and selfish.

Write about an empty birdcage. Birdcage can read: building, structure, abandoned or adorned. As in: loop and tighten a vine of nostalgia around the room you currently brick yourself into. Recreate the sweet of jasmine, but mortar the door so it will not seep through.

Write about an empty birdcage. Replay us the scene. As in: she presses her pale cheek against the window, and he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her pale cheek against the window, and he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her pale cheek against the window, and he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final.

Write about an empty birdcage. Write about the hinges. Describe them as dry knuckles.

Editorial Reviews

Elaina M. Ellis has a voice that cuts through wool. Rich in sound and sense, meaning and madness, she signals and signifies. Her imagery comes from a place of truth and her people sweat and breathe. Hers is a talent that can set the world on fire.
-Jenny Factor, author of Unraveling at the Name

How very lucky we are to have a poet who can write and say with beauty and conviction so many parts of life and love that people tell us are bad or wrong. I'm better off for reading and re-reading Ms. Ellis' work, and my guess is you will be better off too.
-Kate Bornstein, author of Hello, Cruel W

From the Publisher