Roseanne Carrara’s poem “Curses” taps into that superstitious elf in all of us. You know the one. You’re merrily going about your day until a crow alights on your windowsill. You look outside, frantically hoping to see more black wings because while two crows means marriage, one means imminent doom. Or maybe crows don’t bother you. Maybe it’s toasting with an empty glass or passing underneath a ladder. Wherever that illogical shiver comes from, it’s hard to shake.
In “Curses,” Carrara addresses interior rather than exterior omens, the ones that come from poor decisions not chance encounters. What happens, she asks, when presented with an opportunity to do a good deed, you don’t? Or, to reference Joan Didion’s “On Morality,” what happens if you leave a dead body by the road as a coyote chew toy? In Carrara’s poem, the body belongs to a squirrel, and “curses” means something like “dread.”
The poet perfectly captures the guilt that shadows us when we make the wrong decision. The poem begins, “Do not be surprised if, having been asked to perform / some service or ceremony, and flying from it, you / have your turn with curses.” Briefly, I misremembered the title of this poem as “Self-Preservation,” and there’s something of that, too. It suggests you bury that squirrel to avoid getting your “comeuppance.” Carrara’s use of humor serves the poem well, tempering what could become didactic. Instead, these lines offer possibilities, not absolutes, and the result is an engaging meditation on our fears, warranted or not.
“Curses” appeared in the most recent issue of Harp & Altar.
(Elf houses!)
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