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“Storm Music” and “Bird Cries,” from my second poetry collection, Seize (Four Way Books, 2020), are instrumental in developing the book’s central narrative and thematic arcs: the complex father-son relationship and intense, vacillating physical and emotional states precipitated by my son Brendan’s seizures—between static and song, lightning and light. The father-speaker lives on this precipice, where he simultaneously tries to keep his son from falling and flying. While working on this manuscript, which was fourteen years in the making, I discovered that my son’s journey offered a lens into other experiences and traumas—personal, ancestral, and historical. Poems like “Seized” and “Truce” juxtapose the seizure of his brain by epilepsy to the unjust incarceration of my mother, Renko, as a baby in Topaz prison camp. These seizures illuminate and resonate with other forms of seizure: the tragic murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard, and the PTSD of war veterans.
As I ordered the poems, I found that our family quest with Brendan served as both through line and jumping-off point, allowing for coherence of diverse subject matter and, at the same time, dynamic movement between different time frames and stories. While “Storm Music”—which I revised after publication in Southern Humanities Review to sharpen certain images and metaphors—takes us through chaos, poems toward the end of the collection create progression and lead us toward resolution. The redemptive and transformative power of music and art is evident in “Gold and Oak” and “My Mother Watches Horses with Brendan.” Music and painting give us another way to better understand Brendan and steer us through our storms. My son, both without words and beyond them, takes many forms in our attempts to grasp him. He is a bird in “A Boy” and “Bird Cries.” Brendan is fragile and fierce, caged and free. Singing his own language, he clears his own path through the real world while floating through the liminal space of our hopes and dreams. |
Manuscript Making: On Crafting Collections |
Storm MusicSon, a record skips
inside you. Jagged spikes, notes bent, warped thunder. We tried to fix you. Your mind smoke, wafting between us. Halfway up, your clear gaze cuts out. We curse starts and stops. Warped, you skip inside us. Your flame stains us. We skip a breath and hold you. Your lightning ends in blood, scattered food. Your thunder, fed by our faults, you skip over us, pull us all into the red. Brendan, a storm is not your face. We wait for lightning to be light. |
Bird CriesI miss exits, veer
through the world dangerous. Drive with earplugs, strain my neck to check if my little boy is all right. At home I wear headphones to block out his squawks. In my own bird cage. Shut up I yell when he breaks through. Squeeze his cheeks hard. Hold him by the shoulders. Be quiet. A flock of seizures. His fingers claw into my wrist. He says so little. I can’t shut him out. His good arm flaps. Shadows swoop down on him. I keep him from falling, keep him from flying. Some sounds are torture my dad says. If my boy is quiet, his friends will like him. When he screams, neighbors could think I’m hitting him. I strain to hear the radio, cry when I drive to work. A blackbird can be seen thirteen ways. I fly to retreats to write about him. When I come back, he is still caged. I shampoo his hazel hair, and he soothes me with coos Ay ai . . . Nice voice buddy I tell him. He nests quiet in his wheelchair. Poor little guy my mother reminds, so much to say and no words. His mind a deep sky she believes he will rise into. |
"Storm Music" and "Bird Cries" from Seize © 2020 by Brian Komei Dempster. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher. His volumes of poetry, Seize (Four Way Books, 2020) and Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), have received several honors, including the Julie Suk Award, an NCPA Gold Award in Poetry, and a Human Relations Indie Book Silver Winner award. He is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and Director of Administration for the Master’s in Asia Pacific Studies program at the University of San Francisco, where he was a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition, he teaches for the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference..
