The Only Miracle

Chet'la Sebree

In a different life, I’d be a somm or a psalm—a Nebbiolo expert or a prayer. In this life, I am practicing to be both—from dead rose petals and wet forest floor to knees numb from genuflection.

           Wine:                   one of the few miracles

                     outside of the virgin birth.

           Wine:                            used to purify.

Yea though I walk through the valley of uncertainty, hydroxychloroquine washes over me like the smooth bouquet of a red currant Gamay. And as I bend to sow, I confess what I already know: I am both air and water and closer to being a god than I thought my bloated griefs, beliefs, body would ever bring me.

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Chet’la Sebree is the author Blue Opening; Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Mistress, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Her debut essay collection turn (w)here: a geography of home is forthcoming in 2026. Currently, she’s an assistant professor at the George Washington University and faculty member in Randolph College’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

"Through accounts of chronic illness, generational trauma, and holding out hope for the future, the yearning third volume from Sebree (Field Study) traces a desire to understand one’s origins. Moving from histories of hereditary disease to questions surrounding the creation of the universe, these poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal. 'I feel furthest from where I’ve come/ when womb wreckage comes in clumps—' begins an early entry titled 'Hiraeth' (Welsh for a mournful kind of longing for home) about the speaker’s inherited menorrhagia, which serves as a painful link to her own beginnings while also setting up her desire for a child. The creative act becomes a way for the speaker to hold off death and decay through a focus on perpetual renewal: 'In poems, I return to water like a baptismal font. Here, I can Big Bang myself—begin again ad nauseam.' A highlight of the final section is a crown of sonnets addressed to an unborn child, imagining motherhood as chance to break cycles of generational trauma and raise the child in an Edenic environment: 'In our garden,/ you will choose from which trees to eat—.' Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy."
—Publishers Weekly

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