‘Flightless Gosling’ by Carling Berkhout

Nestled in a collection of four poems, Carling Berkhout’s ‘Flightless Gosling’ is a gentle elegy to the past. The poem soothed me, the lines “how beautiful it is that the wind howls bedtime lullabies” akin to my own thought about how it feels to find a good poem—how lucky we are for the poems that howl bedtime lullabies. Tonally, the poem is sweet and sharp, as interested in tender-hearted moments of the past as it is with rough rawness of the now. For every lullaby there are splintered bones; for every bird escaping the bounds of earth there is the flightless gosling. Her poem soothes exactly because it’s balanced. We can trust Berkhout to capture the duality—the honesty—of a moment: when we are suffused with the love we once felt, and hold in ourselves as well, the great grief of what we lost.

Anti-Heroin Chic