Page 28 of Beneath the Poet's House

You’ve lost it. The Saoirse of just two days ago would hate you for falling for another man, for any man, so fast.

She doesn’t bother replying. It feels too good to embrace the rush of dopamine, the high of surging norepinephrine. It’s too tempting to believe that, this time, she’s in the right fairy tale. Not one where she’s at the mercy of her opportunistic father or locked in a tower by her ogreish husband. Saoirse catches their waitress’s eye and lifts their empty bottle of wine.Yes,she says with a nod of her head,we would like another.

“Don’t judge me,” she whisper-hisses at Jonathan. Mercifully, he stays silent.

Emmit joins the woman onstage and takes the microphone. “Thank you.” Though he seems to address the crowd, he stares directly at Saoirse. “I’m Emmit Powell, writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins and a creative writing professor at Brown University. My novel,VultureEyes, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a few years back. Despite these perceived accolades—and while I’d love the opportunity to regale you all with a little Edgar Allan Poe while you dine—I’m here to introduce”—he gestures in her direction—“Miss Saoirse White.”

A chorus ofNos!andWhat the hells?sound in Saoirse’s head. Despite his grandstanding, she hadn’t thought he was going to do it. Hadn’twantedhim to do it. But the only thing worse than reading would be to get onstage and not have anything to read, so she fumbles for her cell phone—amazing how much a few glasses of wine after not drinking for so long have affected her—opens her photos app, and navigates to one of the poems she wrote last night.

“Saoirse’s poetry is both moving and disarmingly candid. I know you’ll enjoy listening to her tonight.”

The expression on his face is one she’s never seen before: pride and lust, like some mix of a literary colleague and the stranger from the top floor of the Athenæum ... a stranger who’s becoming less and less unknown to her at every turn. Clearly, he’s just being nice, since he doesn’t know the first thing about her poetry. Nice andwildlypresumptuous. Though, despite her anger, doesn’t something else flutter inside her? Excitement? Self-respect at her newfound prowess and prolificacy? More of a thrill at being alive than she’s experienced in years?

There’s no time for further contemplation, however, because Emmit is gesturing for her to join him.

“Please help me welcome her to the stage.”

Chapter 17

Saoirse steps in front of the audience with a mixture of resigned control and little-girl fear. She takes the microphone from Emmit, manages a weak smile at the crowd, and tests the mic: “My name is Saoirse White. I used to write cozy mystery novels, but I’ve recently become something of a poet.”

Emmit, who’s made his way back to their table, whistles and claps his hands. Saoirse unlocks her phone and zooms in on the image of her notebook, the lines marred with smears of ink and a few—but not many—cross-outs.

“I’ll get right to it.” She clears her throat, willing herself to exude more confidence than she feels. “This is called ‘The Weight of Birds.’” From her position on the stage, she can see the waitress approaching Emmit, but the woman fails to gain his attention and leaves the wine on the table without having him taste it. It’s the intensity with which Emmit stares at her, waiting, that gives Saoirse the strength to begin.

She reads the first stanza with slight hesitation, but by the time she starts the second, her voice has taken on the quality of a professional, Sarah Whitman onstage at the suffragist banquet, reshaping judgments with each provocative metaphor and slick rhetorical question:

“What to do with a cracked egg

when it is empty?

Where to put the pieces of the shells that once held

the thing you swore you’d treasure most in this world

but which now contains nothing but disappointment

and regret,

an empty repository to hold

tears that shoot from your eyes like filoplumes,

pain like talons clipped too far into the quick,

and the blood your heart still pumps,

having no one to tell it

that the ghosts of birds do not bleed?”

By the poem’s closing lines, after Saoirse has recalled the pain she felt not when writing the words but during the events that inspired the words in the first place—“Weight is the endless night. / A night where birdsong is lost / to sleeping throats / and children are lost / to angry husbands, / whose words become speech bubbles / out of which whole flocks / spring forth.”—she feels she could take flight herself. She reads the final stanza in a voice both as plaintive as the purr of a starling and as sharp as a vulture’s beak:

“If a whip-poor-will calls out

in an empty forest,

does its trill fill the bellies

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