As if the song encoded in the wheel could railroad
to the garden, the mechanical grind transformed
the nightingale to music-box, the music to evergreen
vistas. The firebird was another story: inventory
of dust on the wings. Dried blood on the red-gold
coat. One thread about tin substitutes for splendor,
the other a ghost-image for your burdened heart.
Easy to confuse the black chinoiserie with feathers
torn from ashes, twin halves for a childhood fear:
you were never loved. You could surrender
to the hammer or the flame but no one would come.
That which they called wonder was only a greased key
in a courtesan's palm, and when the bird sang, no one
heard the sound a wing makes when the current breaks.
— First published in Meridian, Issue 67, January 2009
Oregon Coast, © 2008Biography
Karen Rigby reviews contemporary fiction
and nonfiction for Bookbrowse.com,
reads poetry for Sotto Voce, and is one of the editors, together with Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Sally Molini, for a journal of literature, arts, and culture, Cerise Press.
Her chapbooks are
Savage Machinery (Finishing Line Press, 2008)
and Festival Bone (Adastra Press, 2004).
Her awards include a 2007 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts and a fellowship for a June 2006 residency at the Vermont
Studio Center. Poems have been published in Field, Mid-American Review, New England
Review, Black Warrior Review, Swink, Cimarron Review, Phoebe: a Journal of Literature and Art, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review and other journals.
Karen was born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, where she lived until moving to the U.S. in 1997. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BA in Creative Writing
and an additional major in English (2001) and from the University of Minnesota
with an MFA in Creative Writing (2004).
