What’s worse
a tiger or an empty
tiger cage
– C.T. Salazar

We spend a lot of time trying to connect ourselves to the outside world. We are who we are, but do we really see it that way? Are we our own reality? And when we catch up to ourselves, we find we are tingling toes, prayer birds, wolf cubs, and gravity collapsing around you. C.T. Salazar gives us both a story of love, but also of finding oneself amidst the distractions of, well, everything else.

Because, in fact, “most of us / are born with a stranger’s / face,” we are all fighting an uphill battle to recognize who we are. There’s a sense of forgiveness throughout this collection. Forgiving oneself for the birds and body roosting in emptiness, for the flipped car, for the idea that there are so many “hearts beating in tandem” and we just can’t keep up with all of them.

Beyond all the forgiveness and search for self, there is a stillness here. There is the following a falling feather, the lightning, the reminder that you are a piece of those from whom you came.

Purchase your copy of Forty Stitches Sewing a Body Against a Ramshackle Night from Animal Heart Press.

#tpq5 birds haiku life love stitches the poetry question tpq