Boy

The death of a youngest sibling as a child, an alcoholic and distant father, a grief-stricken family, a tentative faith: these are the building blocks of the narrative of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history. 

Tracy Youngblom earned her MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Previous books include two chapbooks, Driving to Heaven and One Bird a Day, and one full-length collection, Growing Big. Her poems and prose have been published in Shenandoah, Wallace Stevens Journal, Big Muddy, DMQ, Cortland Review, St. Katherine Review, Blue Mountain Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other places. She earned a 2017 Pushcart nomination for the poem “Even when it appears, the truth” from Boy. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches English full-time at Anoka-Ramsey Community College. Her second full-length collection of poems, Boy, released with CavanKerry Press in 2023.

ix.

Such portent at your birth:

youngest boy in a family
of girls—wished for, loved—

too much? We sisters meant

business, bore down to help
you, love that wanted to keep you

always small. It would not be.

Or it would. That day,
you were just trying to visit

the dog, only other boy around. You were

sick—heartsick?—missed your grip
and spun, grasping at nothing—not railing,

but sudden air—tumbled down,

took in a patchy last view: open
doorway, sunlit kitchen. That’s the story

I invent: your final glance something

to carry with you. That’s not all
I imagine: those bumps—one step

at a time—the fatal one—and your

breaths at the last—not gasps—
a steady slowing, the body as it wades

in water, the water like hands stroking

the skin—so death would have been
gentle. Dear God, here’s futility:

thinking like this: pretending
I am talking to you and not

expecting an answer.

xvii.

Silence of aftermath:
emptiness: chair

with no boy, undented
pillow on the made bed,

that bear I found
in the closet, sealed

in a plastic bag, its round
dark puddle eyes, red

felt mouth curdled
by words—as we all—

when we tried to speak
of it—what was.

xxviii.

September came with its flagrant
announcement of destruction,

flamboyant death-clothes. We returned
to school. Cool air bit our bare

knees, tossed our hair into frenzies.
Fourth grade was here, where math

turned suddenly incomprehensible.
I knew that everyone knew

I was minus one. Banked on
their embarrassment: who would ever

ask, How are you now that your only
brother is dead? To ward off even silent

pity, my chin would rise to ridiculous
heights: I’m fine. Distant, smiling.

They could look at me and never see
anything resembling the truth.

“I cried into a plaid shirt,” Tracy Youngblom writes about the funeral of her younger brother. “Even / birdsong tacked to air scratched / our ears.” Defiantly observant, fiercely intelligent, the speaker of this book-length sequence is the preteen middle sister watching her family crumble and, decades later, the mother of her own boys while grappling with the past’s “fragmented, mosaiced / wreckage.” Youngblom pulls no punches here. In her thoroughly engrossing narrative, we find not elegy, but the powerful and intimate chronicle of a woman seeking answers.
—Annie Kim, author of Into the Cyclorama and Eros, Unbroken 

When Tracy Youngblom is a child herself, her younger brother dies, in a quick and utterly random accident. And then—the world goes on. This is the intimate and unvarnished truth of how that happens in a family, and the reality is so much more complex and varied than you could imagine: cold, desperate, cynical, cyclical, beautiful. Somehow Youngblom creates poems that are both unflinching and exquisite—just please read this book, you will never forget it.
—Kirsten Dierking, author of One Red Eye, Northern Oracle, and Tether

104 pages
Tracy Youngblom
Pub date – February 2023
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-99-0
Emerging Voices – Poetry