Blackbird Archive
← v21n3, Spring 2023
Poetry · Volume 21, Number 3

CPR @ 2pm

Ibe Liebenberg

I have rehearsed all of this.

The physical emotion.

I’ve closed eyes. Drowned

the room crying. I was the breathless

walls. The stress of sirens and

engine cussing residence.

I was the finger shaking the map

and the road to your house trembling.

I did not practice the neighborhood scream.

The buzzing single-wide fluorescent light.

I did not practice a blue doll left alone

face down on the living room floor.

How could I practice

no one holding you.

workviolencegrief
Ibe Liebenberg

Ibe Liebenberg’s work has been published in Poetry , The Threepenny Review , Ecotone , and The American Journal of Poetry . A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, he is enrolled in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He works as a firefighter, and is a lecturer at California State University, Chico.