- Olivia Brooks
- May 20
- 2 min read
Updated: May 23
About the Work: Christian Paulisich
In our “About the Work” series, SER editors ask recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Christian Paulisich's work in SER Vol. 43.1.
“A Fly Buzzed at the Feast on the Anniversary of Your Death”
As someone who often writes without an end in mind, I find that poems where I set intentions for theme or form early on in my process are some of the most challenging poems for me to write. “A Fly Buzzed at the Feast on the Third Anniversary of Your Death” is an elegy at its core yet feels unique to other poems I have written about loss. By focusing on a singular moment of reflection, I think I’ve created something truer to my actual experience of grief, which most days feels like a never-ending state of getting by. In revising an early draft of this poem, a former professor helped me realize that to do justice to this poem, and my experience, I needed to write a poem in which the act of reading the poem mimicked the speaker’s individual experience of this loss. I found myself returning to Sharon Olds’ poem “The Race” for its ability to literally create a breathlessness on the page that resonates with the speaker and reader’s emotional experience of the poem’s content. In attempting this feat, I decided to make the poem a single sentence with heavily enjambed lines so that by the time the reader reached that final stanza, the end stop of the final line provides some sense of relief as if stopping to take a breath. Upon reading the poem again, this end stop seems to complicate the speaker’s envy of the river and its ability to continue moving even after losing the fish which provided the occasion for us to commemorate my grandmother’s death, reflecting on the miracle of living, of breathing—beyond loss.
CHRISTIAN PAULISICH received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He was recently chosen as an honorable mention for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry and a finalist for Frontier Poetry's 2024 Nature & Place Contest, and received a Summer 2024 fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. His work has been published in Literary Matters, Denver Quarterly, the Atlanta Review, New American Writing, and others.