On In the Sixth Month by Sarah McKinstry-Brown
by Matt Mason
Nebraska State Poet emeritus
Hi, my name is Matt Mason, I am the State Poet of Nebraska, here for Poets on the Plains.
Today, I’m here with Nebraska poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown’s poem “In the Sixth Month.”
The poem is from Sarah’s book Cradling Monsoons from Blue Light Press which won the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry and was her first full-length collection.
Sarah originally comes from Albuquerque, New Mexico and moved to Omaha after she did a nationwide poetry tour in 2002. She became a big part of Omaha’s and Nebraska’s poetry community, organizing events, running writing workshops, working in programs inside retirement homes and much more.
One of my favorite events that Sarah ran several times was her Poet’s Diners which served as fundraisers for different causes. In them, patrons would order poems off a menu and the poets would come to the tables to deliver their servings of words.
Besides publishing two books and co-editing an award-winning anthology of Nebraska woman poets, she’s published several chapbooks and released CDs of her work. And here’s her poem:
In the Sixth Month
Your inner ear has fully formed.
You can hear now. I’ve heard
of mothers playing their unborn babies
Bach and Mozart because classical music
makes the brain’s spatial connections
arc towards one another like the fingertips
of Adam and God in the Sistine.
I’ve played no such music for you, and maybe,
someday, when the boy you pine for
majors in architecture,
or when your brain goes cloudy
as you stare at your pop quiz in geometry,
you’ll hold this against me.
Truth is, I can’t bear headphones on my stomach,
won’t force you to sit in the front row seat
of your mother, the auditorium,
while Pachelbel’s Canon fires off the synapses
of your brain. For the same reason, I can’t bring myself
to have your father recite French
or fractions into my belly.
No sonata or tongue or equation
could teach us what we’re learning already:
that to be human is to be heavy,
to carry more than one heart inside of you.
Without speaking, you and I are two fugues
coexisting. The armies of this world ought to blow up
their road maps and speeches and tanks,
put down their flags, and put
their ears to my womb—
take notes on how our pulses negotiate,
listen to how this belly stretches like an accordion, a peace accord
making room for the song of you.
Now this poem of course means a lot to me as Sarah is my wife, so that’s my daughter she’s talking to. But even with not all that kind of connection, this is also a poem I go back to often, lines like “…to carry more than one heart inside you” stops me dead in my tracks every time. I love the playfulness of the start and how it disarms me for that ending which, though still talking about the child inside of her, is also talking about the much broader frustrations of this world we live in, the wars and disregard for life we see in the news daily, and how just as the poem might tip too heavy, it ends with that gorgeous: “…making room for the song of you.”
McKinstry-Brown’s poems are musical, she pays such great attention to song and tone and sound, and though she can write very serious work, she’s also one of the funniest poets I know, she works it in very subtly on the page, but takes a great touch.
You can find her work in Rattle, Smartish Pace, Ruminate, Sugar House Review and more, and her 2nd book is This Bright Darkness which came out in 2019 from Black Lawrence Press.
Thank you,
This is Matt Mason; I am the Nebraska State Poet from 2019 until the end of 2024, I’m based out of my home here in Omaha.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Matt Mason served as the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024 and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found in Rattle, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and in hundreds of other publications. Mason’s 5th book, Rock Stars, was published by Button Poetry in 2023. You can find more about Matt at https://midverse.com/
FEATURED POET
Sarah McKinstry-Brown is the author of Cradling Monsoons (Blue Light Press, 2010) and This Bright Darkness (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Born and raised in Albuquerque, Sarah is the recipient of three Nebraska Book Awards, an Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry and a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Award. An Editorial Board Member for Spark Wheel Press, Sarah’s poems appear in RATTLE, Ruminate, Smartish Pace, South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review, West Virginia’s Standardized tests (a beautiful irony given that she was, is, and will always be, a terrible standardized
