Brian Tierney

 Brian Tierney

Fixing a Hole

One Uncle was shocked the year Korea ended. My great aunt was shocked. Great-grandfather shocked. His older sister, Evelyn, shocked in Greystone Park, while in a mostly paper room, where nothing had an edge, Woody Guthrie twisted pilfered twine into strings, using two to braid a tight, single E. I thought of his hands all the time, said X. I am only telling you what I couldn’t have seen. Gripping the line that goes straight to the machine, to the temple, to Cousin Kristen and another I can’t name. One great aunt from Yonkers put it this way: a sort of snow drifting nighttime trenches. My brother tells me: I keep having this nightmare, a migraine light beating off a plate, you know—a bright wall of water, sometimes crystalline, obscuring a cave.