An Excerpt from “Muzzle” by Rivka Clifton

In her debut full collection of poetry, Rivka Clifton, a curator of curiosities, challenges us to consider language as a form of violence. Challenges us to understand what violence can be: memory, both lived and re-lived. Rivka draws on her personal journey with these powerful landscapes, which are part incantation, part exorcism. The poems in Muzzle contemplate the relationship between speech and violence and how translating the experience of grief and loss into language can itself be a form of violence—through one’s initial experience and living memory. How can everyday speech be violent, how can small violences be a means of communication — these are the questions posed to us by Muzzle. As we traverse the poems in this collection, we are invited to consider our own lives, our own relationship with memory, grief, loss, love, and yes, violence.

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Borgman

After a lifetime
away, I return to

the taut strings
of the Midwest. 

Its white sheds
bruise with evening.

Each tooth in 
a dog’s mouth

pulling a long 
note from a carcass.

Muzzle

Clouds stretch 
unreachable webs

across the tree-line.
Maples shed 
their cardinal leaves. 

A pack of hunters 
lies prone in the field.

A cloud spills grey
oil over their guns 

They aim at a wolf 
who, a second ago,
was someone’s son. 

I am someone
who has held a gun.

Snuffer’s

Or whatever. I just don’t want my brain there, our daughter said into her phone as she spun her keys like a handgun. In your town, they dedicated a whole section of the morgue to the brainless (and their gasping scalps). One evening at a Kroger, you made a joke to the cashier. He was 17 and believed you. We could just as easily not have had a daughter. At Snuffer’s, whose meat is tender like a child’s, you made the same joke to our waitress. Her sympathetic laugh, like a side of fruit, stayed with me through the meal. You told our daughter about the birds’ erratic acrobatics—the tiny gaps between wingtips, between eye and beak. What a mess when you think about it, I mused after pointing out a moon-bleached tarp caught on barbwire. After asking if a body thrown from a vehicle would flap at the same frequency, you turned to our daughter. You said, When I see something, I say something.