Blue Jay

By Clare Banks

Issue 43 • Spring 2021 • Poetry

His poem printed with a Walter Inglis
Anderson bluejay hangs on your son’s
bedroom wall. That you measured the distance
between door and window, pounded a nail
into the plaster, and leveled the angle
of the frame, that you allow it to remain
there at all, quietly, a bird on a branch,
a blue crest against cream paint, like feathers
through the palest of leaves, is a kind
of forgiveness. You might read it at night
when your boy is sleeping, his light wings
folded under his sheet, you might return
to the indecipherable word. Flutter?
No: feather or fault. Your father’s tilted
capitals blurred, crowded, his hand beginning
to rush, his poem at the end in flight.

Clare Banks

Clare Banks is associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Hopkins Review, Mississippi Review, and Boulevard, among others. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City.

Sève Favre

Sève Favre is a visual artist, originally from the French part of Switzerland. In 2005, she created her first modular artwork. She has exhibited in Switzerland and abroad. In 2020, Sève Favre was nominated for the Arte Laguna Prize in Installation and Sculpture. Passionate about the concept of integration, she concentrates on transcending the classical boundary between the artwork and the viewer. The main feature of her art is interactivity. The key words that support her concept are interaction (be together), variation (be different), and activity (be active). Her name for this experience is “intervariactivity.”