levelheaded: Stridor

The three-line stanzas of Priscilla Wathington’s “Stridor” are a manifestation of the poet’s and/or speaker’s desire to impose order. Given the poem’s subject matter—a child struggles to breathe and his parent struggles to cope with the child’s suffering and the uncertainty of life—we can understand why Wathington would want to control what she can. And yet, written in free verse with a slew of enjambed lines, “Stridor” never feels forced.

From the outset, the speaker recognizes how little control we have: “It will not be a testament to you / your child’s life expectancy.” Perhaps the pain of this reality is a reason for the use of the second-person. The word “you” creates a distance that may make things more bearable for our speaker. These first lines are a reminder of how alone we are as humans. Even if we are wrapped “inside [the] robe” of our caretaker, we unfurl to face our own challenges.

So the poem’s second sentence unfurls into cruelty, tumbling from “skin pulled into ribs” to “demons” to “the bark from his lungs” to “nose- / diving into the Navy’s bay” to “burning men.”  The speed of these lines nearly causes us to pass over their graphic and violent images without considering their horror.

A sentence later, these war-inspired images return as we learn the child’s limbs are “to grow / from barrels.” The child, born into and out of a harsh world, finds “milk from his cannons.” The natural and seemingly unnatural collide in this image, as they do in the image of a car plowing through flower dust, as they do in the concept of a child dying and a parent left to cope.

– The Editors