Frisbee, by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle

A graduate of Vassar College, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop as well as a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa. She also holds MAs from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and New York University.  Her chapbook, Black Wick: Selected Elegies, was chosen as the 2020 Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press, who published it in 2021. Recently appointed the Poet Laureate of Sullivan County for 2022-2024 she lives and teaches in New York.

Author Foreword:

The poem “Frisbee” records an experience I had when visiting my young son’s new grave when the ground began to give way. Stanzas capture the unbearable pain of losing a child, including the desire to switch places with them, even while engaged in the desperate and pathetic gesture of trying to “restore” the mound. 

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Two weeks later, I visit. 

Kneeling now on the mound, my face so close 

I can eat your dirt. 

But what’s this 

opening, escaping,  

leaking back? 

giving way, a sinking 

I could fall into, 

following the stone-plumbed line,  

willing to switch places? 

Just air escaping,  

earth-sighs, 

normal, the undertaker says 

after the ground thaws suddenly 

But it goes deeper 

the more I kneel, stones trickle farther, faster down, so I have to 

scoop furiously with whatever stone,  

any slab I can grab,  

avalanche after my hand, working 

to fill in the blank. 

With a Frisbee now (the only hard edge from the car) scraping dirt over the O-gape 

How you’d cackle and scorn me again, my toy tools even while other clayey mouths open, 

venting, asking for answers.