Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Elaine Equi! Celebrate by reading the three Equi poems below, which we published in 2024! And then go read the Equi poems we published in 2019 (and go watch Equi reading those poems), 2021, and 2023! And buy and read Equi‘s Out of the Blank, (Coffee House Press), which features nine poems originally published in Big Other!

Blue Carapace

Protective dome
clamped on
like a helmet at dawn.

Midnight blue
waxing and waning
a tall tale on the terrace.

Cool core of the flame.

The storyteller’s pipe
is lit with the tip of
the blue fairy’s wand.

Untitled, Vivian Maier

Who can resist a chorus of empty bottles—
amber, topaz, green—on a flea market tray?

Not Vivian Maier.

That’s her reflection hovering over them,
camera raised,

deliberately catching herself in the act of looking,
and framing it in a small adjacent mirror.

She is looking at the bottles, but reversed in the photo
she appears to be looking at us
with a certain suspicious uncertainty.

Like Hitchcock, she often made cameo appearances
in her photos.

Would take self-portraits
in an era before selfies
of her shadow on a wall.

There was something democratic
about her willingness
to place herself among the things she saw—
be just another element in the picture.

Perhaps there was also a bit of assertiveness—
the desire not just to look,
but also, one day, to be seen.

Wind Chimes in the Glass Mountains

Bestowing a calm
but giddy effervescence,

a silver affluence
on the after-snow of the afternoon
where Stevens counts his blackbirds

and the voices of the twin sopranos
scale new heights
melting our cold coal hearts
like lumps of sugar in hot tea.

Forgiven—all is for giving.

Even the Disney princess
in her glass coffin
opens an eye to shed a frozen tear.