“If I Cannot Fly” lets Amy Saul-Zerby explore the many manifestations of love. We experience this emotion in a multitude of ways. On the shorter timeline, we have the ones where we trade through, the constant shifts through relationships. Not all are created equally, and not all should be fought for, yet some are worth the fight. She also shares pieces of herself, her family tree and all its branches with the reader. Here we learn about the genealogy of the family, of what runs in the family. We cannot change our medical history; we can only change how we approach it. Like her grandfather so bluntly puts it, when he takes the pills he’s fine; when he doesn’t, he’s not. Acceptance is a major part of life, perhaps the most essential rule. When we understand what we can and cannot change, that’s when the world opens.
Amy opens up to the reader within these poems. She mentions New Jersey in a multitude of ways, both with the actual world and in reference to saltwater taffy. Believe it or not, I only associate saltwater taffy with New Jersey. I am sure places outside of New Jersey make saltwater taffy, but those other places suck. She offers kindness towards the Garden State, her adoptive home. I think Amy was born there, but when you are born in a state, you are always part of that state. Perhaps in another life I could have ended up in New Jersey, but instead I chose the wild world of the Upper Midwest with tornado sirens and Culver’s. I personally adore Culver’s, and anybody who badmouths it is literally banned from at least 11 different states. That’s the love people have for the frozen custard and chicken sandwiches.
Speaking of the West though, Amy mentions an epiphany in Montana alongside Montana native Shy. You might think Shy has a last name, but she is like Cher in that people only refer to her by her first name. During a concert of The National variety (what can I say, Montana is America’s heartland), she realizes what she misses. Time heals all wounds, but the heart is more than an average muscle; it is an extraordinary muscle. When we have families, we grow that muscle, part of a family first, then growing our own, hopefully, fingers crossed, financial resources properly procured.
Life contains universal themes that make life that much more worth living. Despite being billions of individuals, we all experience a shockingly large number of similarities. We live life as if we have our orbits, little snippets of the orbits as fragments of Venn Diagrams, sometimes overlapping for a moment, sometimes staying there forever. Figuring out the difference between the two is what Amy Saul-Zerby’s “If I Cannot Fly” is all about.
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amy saul zerby always seemed angelic to me, a distant admirer on the internet