Category: Aquifer
Metaphorical Ghosts
There are so many ways to describe
the fact that we die and are reborn
countless times: the New Year’s resolution list,
the myth of a phoenix rising from ashes,
the box of hair dye and the scissors, the poets:
dying is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
But no one ever talks about the ghosts.
The dead ones that that turn your bones
into a creaky, old haunted mansion.
And no one talks about how frequently girls die
in a lifetime. Girl after girl after girl after girl.
Some of them are mischievous and hopeful,
frolicking in your ribcage like a child who thinks
everything will turn out all right.
Yet some of them are screaming.
And when you hear the way she cried out,
again, it keeps you up at night. You don’t know
how to escape her, banish her,
remove her like a threatening mass. But some of them
you encounter in the night like lost strangers.
That girl that walked the pier barefoot
in a fluorescent bikini with other girls,
that girl who hated herself so much
she had no understanding of the power
of her body. But the water’s rhythm, hungrily
tonguing the sand, spoke its subliminal language:
the eros that promised it would erupt in waves
within her body underneath a boy’s body. So that
when the boys came along, sunned and shirtless
in their glistening madness, and told the girls
to jump off the ledge, chanting, do it, just do it,
don’t think about it, and the idea of drowning
passed briefly overhead like the shadow of a seagull,
she leapt in. And the boys laughed, caught it all on film.
And you know she made it to the surface again,
gasping life more forcefully than ever,
and the water droplets on her body
were proof of her glittering courage,
toweled off a beat too slowly by the boys,
and you know it was fine—it was, yes, it was fine—
she survived, she giggled, she gave the boys her number,
so who then is this young girl that just coughed
salted sand onto your poem with seaweed in her hair?
On Cocktail Parties
“Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.” —T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
My parents met in a nightclub on Catalina Island. My mother was 28, my father 26. My father was on the island with a group of friends, childhood buddies from Ohio who had all moved to southern California together after WWII. My mother, born and raised in Los Angeles, was visiting with her best friend. The story goes that my dad begged her to dance. Later, when my mother refused to go back to his hotel with him, he called her a prude. She vowed that anyone who called her a prude would have to marry her, and six months later, that’s exactly what happened. Growing up, I never understood what one thing had to do with the other, and when I asked, they simply answered “Cocktails.”
—
It’s widely accepted that the creator of cocktail parties is Mrs. Julius Walsh of St. Louis, Missouri. In May 1917, The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Mrs. Walsh invited fifty guests to her house on a Sunday at high noon for a one-hour gathering. The event was an instant hit, and within weeks cocktail parties became a St. Louis institution. The first known cocktail party in England was held seven years later, in 1924. In T.S. Eliot’s dark comic play, The Cocktail Party, a wife leaves her husband just as they are about to host a cocktail party in their London home. The husband must devise an explanation for her absence to keep up with social appearances. The wife returns with a mysterious guest, a psychologist who counsels the couple individually. As the play progresses, husband and wife come to realize the ways they have been deceiving themselves. Two years later, and better adjusted, they host another cocktail party.
—
Things I hated growing up: My parents’ fights. Rain. The letdown after Christmas. Cocktail parties.
—
By 1960, my parents had traded the San Fernando Valley for the small town of Thousand Oaks, a place where everybody knew everybody. Our house sat on a small street with one house next door and three across the street. One end poured into a winding avenue with rounded cul-de-sacs full of one- and two-story houses with bikes and dolls and skateboards littering their yards. The other end opened to a main road with a round hills beyond it.
These were the years punctuated by my parents’ fights. Although I knew from the sitcoms we watched on television that this was not considered the normal behavior of a married couple, it was all I knew from my mother and father. After the move to Thousand Oaks, my dad had close to an hour drive to and from Los Angeles every day for work, and when he was late, it was easy to blame the traffic. My mother suspected otherwise. She resorted to all the stereotypical tricks of jealous women: scouring through his jacket pockets, demanding to know what happened to his missing cufflink, why it took him three goddamn hours to get home.
“And don’t tell me traffic. Your secretary said you haven’t been in the office all afternoon. Where were you? Who is she? I can smell her sleazy perfume all over you, you sonofabitch.”
My dad ignored her as best he could. Because of his easygoing nature, it seemed to the three of us kids that she was the one always picking a fight. Their arguments grew worse before a holiday, birthday party, or vacation, when it seemed like my mother held on to any insecurities or suspicions for as long as she could, erupting into a tirade threatening to disrupt even the most rock-solid plans. More than once my mother blamed my dad as she called off our plans. We’d go to bed, anxious and disappointed, only to be roused early in the morning with instructions to “Get up. Get dressed. We’re going.”
The morning of my tenth birthday party, after a particularly horrible argument broke out, my mother accusing my dad of yet another affair, she threw her hands in the air and said, “That’s it! Call your friends and tell them you’re not having a party because your father can’t keep it in his pants!”
My dad, trying his best to console me through my tears as well as reason with my mother, fought back. “Leave her and the kids out of it. Look what you’re doing!”
“You’re doing this! I’m not doing a thing!”
I had made most of the phone calls, claiming a sudden stomachache, when my mother, subdued and placated, told me to call my friends back. I was going to have my party, after all.
—
The cocktail parties began around the time I was in the third grade and ended by the time I finished sixth. My mother chose early January for their annual shindig, allowing for the Christmas rush to abate but for the tree and decorations to remain in full display.
My parents’ loud arguments intensified right before a cocktail party, tapering off just long enough to get through the night, only to resurface again the next day. My mother yelled at my dad for the attention he gave or that was given to him by their female guests. “I saw the way you looked at that hussy!” or “Joanna was hanging all over you!”
My dad’s friends were another source of aggravation. A tight-knit group, they were party regulars. My mother couldn’t stand them. An extrovert, my father became louder and sillier among his friends, their talk always revolving around wild teenage shenanigans, like when my dad was eighteen and followed an older married woman from Ohio to Texas, or the foray into a whorehouse at fifteen. There were so many of them, stories as well as friends. Jim, a dark-haired painter, and his wife Millie, a brassy blonde with a wide smile. Cat and Fat, twins with their respective spouses. Louie, a loud Italian with a big heart, accompanied by his current lady of the season. Bill with the ready laugh was on his second marriage to Carolyn, a younger, pretty brunette with aspirations of becoming a pilot. My mother liked Carolyn, and I did, too. She and Bill had no children together and would divorce before having any of their own, but not before Carolyn learned to fly.
Our neighbors came too, couples whose wives my mother met through work and parents of friends of mine and my siblings. This last group never ceased to amaze me, the eagerness with which they reached for their drinks, their voices rising with each glass. My best friend Lauren’s mother—glum Mrs. Stenson, who barely said a word when I was at their house—became radiant after a glass or two. Henry and Deidre Hand lived directly across the street. Henry was British with bad teeth, Deidre a feisty Irish redhead. She had a reputation in the neighborhood for watering her front yard wearing a one-piece bathing suit, bending over low to the ground as she maneuvered the hose over every crack in the driveway.
My parents paraded my brother and sister and me around to prove or disprove claims of inches grown or braces that worked wonders. I felt like the holiday lights or the rosebud-trimmed china: something brought out once a year. We always wore the new flannel pajamas we received at Christmas, Bobby in something boyish and blue, Kathy and I in pink and green flowers.
“Oh, aren’t you just the spitting image of your mother,” I heard over and over as I glanced at my mother, refusing to see any resemblance at all. My dad put his hands on my brother’s shoulders, steering him into the thick of his childhood buddies, where he was greeted by elbow nudges and “Hey, Bobbo!” Kathy worked the crowd with an innate flair, her long golden ponytail bouncing up and down. When the show was over, it was off to bed with orders to keep doors shut and no getting up for water. Shy and introverted, I welcomed our bedroom banishment. My stomach twisted with each ring of the doorbell, flip-flopped as I witnessed my parents shapeshift into characters I didn’t recognize. My outgoing dad upped his enthusiasm, greeted everyone exuberantly, entertained with dancing and jokes, and made sure everyone had a fresh drink in hand. My mother, naturally quieter, with just a few friends she considered close and always critical of everyone and everything, revamped into a chirpy, playful hostess: “Oh Bill, no one tells that story like you do” and “Louie, your spaghetti sauce is divine. I must have the recipe. Don’t go holding out on me now.”
It was impossible to reconcile these two revelers with my parents.
—
Once my sister and I had retreated into our room, I lay awake worried that someone would open the door by accident, thinking it was the bathroom. I worried that someone might stray where they didn’t belong.
It happened once. I was nine, ten, eleven; I don’t quite remember. After a few whispered minutes, my sister fell asleep, leaving me to listen to the muted sounds of the party slip under our closed bedroom door.
I heard the doorknob turn before I noticed its slow circular motion. A man, my dad, stood in the doorway, checking in on me and my sister. I sat up in bed, happy to see him.
“Daddy!”
Only he wasn’t my dad. My bedroom was dark. The only light came in from the hallway, dim from the lamps lit in the living room. His features were shadowed, the light at his back, becoming clearer as he stumbled into my room.
Things I noticed: The clock showing 11:20. Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” playing on the stereo. A woman’s raucous laughter from the living room, followed by male bellowing. My fear. Henry Hand approaching.
The overbearing smell of alcohol clung to him like a stale second skin. I glanced at my sister, asleep in her bed, hoping he wouldn’t see her.
I lay back in bed, clutching the blankets closer.
“Hullo. Still awake are you?” He walked farther into my room and softly laughed. “Oh, you thought I was your daddy?”
I may have nodded, may have said yes. I wanted to yell, wanted to call for my parents, wanted to tell him my dad would be right back, wanted my dad to be right back, wanted to be anything but a terrified girl.
He peered over the side of my bed. The smell of alcohol was sticky, clung to his speech, slurring his accent. “Do you like me? Are you afraid of me?”
I might have said yes. I might have stayed silent.
He sat down on the edge of my bed.
“Of course you like me. There’s nothing to be scared of, love.” He traced his fingers along my arm. “I like you, too.”
I shut my eyes as I began to feel outside of my body. I pulled the blankets over my head, scooting away from him as I felt his weight lean over the bed. He might have squeezed my leg before getting up from my bed, or he might have grazed his hand over my body, lingering toward my thighs before walking out, closing the door behind him.
The next morning I scanned the living room, noticing traces of the night before, from the half-empty glasses scattered across tables in the living room to the sleep deprivation in my mother’s green eyes. As she complained of the mess, I told her that Henry Hand had come into my bedroom.
She hesitated before answering, and I noticed the briefest flicker of alarm rise in her eyes. “You must have had a bad dream.”
“No, I was still awake. I couldn’t sleep with all the noise.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that loud. I’m sure it was just a dream.”
“No, it wasn’t a dream. I would know if it was a dream. He came into my room and—”
“You don’t need to worry, lots of dreams seem real.”
—
A handful of black-and-white Polaroid photographs remain as evidence of my parents’ cocktail parties. The women are adorned in their cocktail dresses and Colgate smiles, the men more casual in their attire but every bit as dazzling in their charm. Hemlines were longer than hairstyles, as women favored the short, bouffant style trendy at the time, except Carolyn, who was the first of the group to wear a miniskirt, and she wore it proud.
In one shot, my dad, Jim and Millie, Bill and Carolyn, and an unidentified couple sit scattered on our cream-colored sofa. Maybe my mother took the picture, as she’s nowhere in the frame. Everyone is smiling, some looking at the camera, others looking at each other. In another picture, Millie turns to Carolyn, Carolyn’s head thrown back in laughter. My mother sits off to the side, in conversation with a woman I don’t recognize. In another, my dad sits in the middle of our small sofa, Louie and Fat flanking either side. My dad’s blue eyes are closed, his hands outstretched and his mouth open, as if in the middle of a song. I’m struck by how young he looks, how young they all look, much younger than in my memories of them. All of them younger than I am now. It’s easy to see how things could get past them.
Sun & Air
Sun
In Oregon once, the acolytes in saffron
sweatshirts and idolatrous medallions
made a vow to grow roots and change
address, to elect the man with the sunset
sport coat to serve as mayor and recast
community codes, to pull a nail here,
an ordinance there, the streets signs
of their Christian neighbors taken down
to make way for the Sanskrit of their master.
At last, the real estate of consciousness
was growing. Less in communal rapture
and rage that climaxed in bewildered tears
than the watchful stillness that came after.
Surely there was nobility in this.
The lotus of their suffering flush, effulgent.
Somewhere a ribcage cools in a field,
stoned on love, that kind that lifts the fog
above its place on earth, but after that,
what? The new human, the archetype
their teacher promised, what they were hoping
to become, what they feared the locals
in hunting gear and office would destroy?
And can you blame them. Say a torch
broke the glass of your hotel in Portland
or a long sleeve poisoned the salad bars
of your town cafés. Who would not feel
some shadow of their partisan nature fall
into the arms of your frightened kind.
I have been that child, that prideful victim
of my own outrage. Call it the fitful
cleansing of a birthmark, the forever
failed extradition of histories of abuse.
Call it shell-shock; or war; or call it
what it is, salmonella and kerosene
and the scarlet seam of the unclean
lesion breaking, but do not call it new.
Puritans of permission raise their cries
as Christ does at the altar, disseminating
wine with a bitter summons to forgive.
Submission and refusal. How better
to survive the next ice age or spiritual
contagion: a thicker coat, warmer meal,
a feast day between tribes; how better to live
and let live than deep inside a system
of guards to wave friends and family through.
The body of the chosen is a body
after all, and so in need of water, harbor,
seasonal fire and the couriers of sleep.
It shrouds itself in skin, as Bibles do,
and great redwoods, and the new human
laid beneath their limbs, a child of heaven
awakened from a scare to find herself,
transfixed, in a crystal of estrangement,
christened in the amber of dusk and dawn.
Air
The holier the stone the more like stone
the power and resolve that laid it, there,
in the heart of the contested common.
The last of the temple King Solomon built.
So say the faithful in their signature black
though doubtless they understand: to build
a wall is no king’s work, but that of servants
who will go nameless, and if another god
claims his prophet hitched here his horse
with wings, there is little to say to make
a god recant, revise, or otherwise move,
to abandon a place like that. The prayer
whispered or tucked into a hole in stone
might be, in installments, one long prayer,
incanted under the breath, and if it helps,
it helps, it mortars, mends, transmogrifies
the dullness of loss that makes a stone a stone,
a holy land a calf whose gold is blood.
*
Every comic dies now and then, but then,
if called, they rise, and folks remember best
the deeply wounded ones who made them
laugh like friends. I am thinking of you,
Greg Giraldo, who told Joan Rivers once,
You used to look your age, now you don’t
even look your species. And then her face—
wounded, tightened, paralyzed, stitched,
healed and babied with the finest lotions—
gave way, and I saw a little white light in
her teeth, a bit of joy, however nervously
touched, beyond the scalpel of this affront
or that desire to be young, I saw her death
in the arms of your addiction, the one
that took you too damn soon, to sit in heaven
and roast God, as your best friend put it,
as if nothing were sacred where everything is,
and each cold mask crumbles into laughter.
*
When I think of idols that have died,
I think of the toy my father saved from
his childhood, how it reddened his shelf.
Beside his picture with the governor,
a small truck with no one in it. It served
as proof of the boy I never met, never
understood. He had so little child
in him, let alone the sentimental kind.
You should always keep one reminder,
he said. I always did, always thought
he loved me better when I was small.
Look at me, said all the rusted places.
And when he left us, they said it again,
look, but what they revealed remained
an empty promise. But I could see it,
touch it. It had wheels. Hollow places.
When I think of death, I think of this.
And it flew into walls and drove right through.
Don’t Muddy the Waters, Do Rock the Boat
Everything That Rises by Joseph Stroud
Copper Canyon Press, 2019
Paperback. 159 pages. $14.00
Stroud is remarkable, having both lyric and prose gifts, a reverence for nature, and a willingness to face up to hard truths. His craft allows him to write necessary poems with immediacy, yet maintain a certain distance in a plain, powerful voice. W. S. Merwin said, “The authority of Joseph Stroud’s poetry is startling . . . it is the recurring revelations that poetry brings to us, the crystal of our ordinary days. Stroud’s poetry comes from the clear source.”
Everything That Rises is an ambitious collection with seven sections, including masterful translations of Tu Fu, Catullus, Neruda, and others. Stroud moves back and forth between lyricism and his more classical distance with ease.
In “The Perfection of Craft,” Stroud gives us a sample of what he does best. The speaker takes us on the hunt with a great blue heron who “stalks among the reeds,” halting to snare his meal. The bird “stabs its beak, flings, into the air a roiling snake, and catches it / tosses it again, . . . / still alive, slithering down the heron’s throat.” He treats his meal as if it’s a game. While the imagery stands out, this poem is really about craft. Is the poet like the heron, and the poem is the snake? The ideas and point of view are complex, the images vivid—a signature Stroud six-liner.
His previous book, Of This World: New and Selected Poems, contained many brilliant poems like this one in the book’s opening section, “Suite For The Common.” And again, in this new collection, with “The Tarantula,” he takes us to a place “below Solomon Ridge,” where this arachnid “the size of my hand” rears up, “feels the air with its front legs / its body covered in silky hair.” The speaker kneels down, and it follows the shadow of his hand, “a little dance before pouncing on the twig I hold before it.” The Theraphosidae is curious, intelligent; then “its fangs click open,” and the speaker stands, takes a step back.
It watches, unmoving,
waiting inside its own arachnid time,
before continuing on,
touching the ground delicately
with each tip of its eight legs,
heading out into the Mojave,
A powerful nature poem, like D.H Lawrence’s snake poem, this tarantula, “walking like a hand,” seems like one of the lords of life, “disappearing into a world where we cannot go.”
Mortality is the undertone and undertow in this book. At the end of Stroud’s first section, we get “Remember This, Sappho Said,” where a nameless shade from the underworld tells the speaker, “remember that / among the living you were once offered love— / you, with your great pride and haughty disdain, / remember, love was once offered, and you refrained,” setting the tone for the scenes of death that follow.
In “Heart Attack in An Oregon Forest,” an anonymous “you” directs a sheriff by cell phone to a remote river where the speaker waits, hearing this stranger on the phone, “his voice calling your name, / asking directions from the dead.”
In “Homage to the Water Ouzel,” Stroud begins, “Times you get so down into pain . . .” but then the speaker thinks of the water ouzel, “into / this aching cold water the little bird plunges / and walks the bottom just trying to stay alive. Imagine that. Jesus Christ. Try to imagine that.” What’s striking is the speaker’s detachment at first, and then the immediacy.
This dark undertone continues in the next section of the book. In “The End of Romanticism,” Stroud gives us a college teacher’s talk to his students at the end of a course on Romanticism. In this powerful prose poem, the teacher talks about Charles Lamb, whom they have not studied, who took care of his mentally ill sister after she had to be confined in Bedlam, “a hospital worse than prison,” for stabbing their mother to death. Later released into Lamb’s care, she and Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare. When her illness recurred—and they had learned the signs— “they knew she had no defense.” “All semester,” says the speaker, “we’ve been discussing Romanticism, The Sublime, the articulation of Personal Emotion, and the power of Imagination. Now imagine this. Holding each other, carrying the restraining straps with them, Mary and Lamb, sobbing, walked the long road back to Bedlam.”
In “The Bridge of Change,” the suicide of Stroud’s teacher and mentor, John Logan, is the subject. We see Logan at the No Name Bar in Sausalito in the 1960s, drinking and holding forth about a boy who witnessed his mother’s death—jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge—as he and his father watched, helpless. Logan offers insight by telling his own theory of poetry,
the poem as a bridge
connecting me to you,
you to me, poetry
in whose healing music we might trace
how to forgive, how to cross over,
making our long difficult way
into grace.
Stroud renders the death of his own parents with restraint in “Campfire.” The speaker remembers a night with his father in the Tehachapis, “How ghostlike his image / appears to me now, how he seems almost a stranger, / and the boy sitting next to him, staring / into the flame, unable to make anything of it, / what do I make of him, / what would I tell him that he should know, / comforted as he is by the warmth of the fire / and the presence of his father sitting next to him / within the deep fatherless night surrounding him.” The speaker’s distance makes this moment universal.
A lot can be learned from Stroud regarding craft. He builds vivid imagery, much like with the blue heron, in “Imagining (Poetry).” Young Stroud and his twin brother hook up a walkie-talkie with tin cans and tell each other secrets, intimate words connected by a string, “hearing at each end only what we might imagine.” And in “Oppen / Praxis” Stroud instructs, “Say what happened in a way that makes it happen again . . . Clarity and accuracy honor the reader. / Don’t muddy the waters. Do rock the boat.”
Stroud has traveled the world searching for poems, novelty—and possibly grace. He’s looked in dangerous places— “somewhere out past Swat, near the Korkorams, no road into it, Westerners forbidden. It was important to me that it be secluded, that to get to it I would have to leave my whole life behind. What was it I so yearned to find?” In the section, “Convergence,” we get a persona poem of a young Incan girl chosen to be sacrificed to the god. In his notes, Stroud says he was haunted by this image for years. He continues this section with omens and religious touchstones, as if the poet is “shoring fragments against his ruins.”
Everything That Rises has no simple arc from grief to redemption. The deaths of family, friends, the coming extinctions in nature, his own mortality, his pain due to the nature of this violent world are all real, but he asks, “Who was it that said / in some long-ago poem / this world is all we have / of Paradise?” Stroud’s instinct is praise.
Winner of many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lamont Foundation, Stroud gives us poems of nature’s abundance with craft folded around absence. In “My Diamond Sutra,” Stroud mentions “dragon boats of poems, set on fire, pushed into the stream.” In this way, he balances light and dark, showing one man’s search for transcendence. His work deserves a wider audience—not only poetry readers. Stroud’s poems do rock the boat.
A Hollyhock… + The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog…
A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz
Later that week I found it in my right side
pocket. It had begun to bloom, blue. Tissuey soft.
To the bottle of carbolic acid went your father.
To brain plaque, the weed of forgetfulness,
went your mother. Still you felt a fondness
for the natural thing, you loved even the mulch,
and the flower of the mallow family, hollyhock.
Come in, you said. From one specimen of the garden
you cut me a sprig, which I pocketed. Banished
from light, from you, from its princedom, a small
Gautama. Then I forgot it was there, down
there in the dark, doing its precise work anyway.
The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog That Surrenders Is
The tongue hangs fat to lick the air,
gray and dry as a gag. Your whole life
you panted after whojustcameherenow,
a bone over there you could smell before
you could see, the wide patch of yard
and a figure of a hart darting in a feral
blur through trees. The joy when some
hand behind you lets go and sends you
running down the open snowy road,
and you are yourself again or for the first
time. Though now what use is there
to tense the metal leash. Now to learn
to work the new trick: one who waits.
It was long ago you learned to stand
off. You learned to stand for nothing.
That was the beginning of your training.
That was when the sky was your whole head.
Now to go on. And to go on. To become
the sick mule, the tagged skin, gnawed bone.
To learn the first art with more willingness,
and then to sit, lie down.
The Future is Trashion
Danger Iceberg
These are pages from a book I have been working on from 2003 to the present. This work has slowly revealed itself to be about water, rising water, and human impact on the planet and is part of a larger project called The Sea Museum. The found book that I am altering to make these photomontages was about destroying icebergs, the problem of icebergs, and appears to have been made for children’s education (Danger! Icebergs Ahead! by Lynn Poole and Gray Johnson Poole, Random House, 1961). I’ve always been interested in the absurd, and was feeling a homage to Hanna Hoch, the great Dada artist. I began adding water and related images. I wasn’t working consciously in the beginning, just covering the pages with water. The subject matter feels prescient now, fifteen years in, and I am still altering the book. Like the oceans, this project continues to exist and change.
Act Now + more
Act Now
When I’m low, I hang out
with the slugs and sugar ants,
I ignore the emails, You will run out
of storage in the cloud.
The clouds
will always make space for me,
I already live in a fog
and there’s always room for more
photos, a virtual bookcase.
As much as I love
being able to type my sadness
to a stranger, my screen sometimes
reaches out and puts its hands
on my hips—stay here a little longer.
I know I’m brave
when I leave my earbuds on the table
next to my cat. And when my stomach
knots, it’s because I’ve hit reply all
and now Dick knows he’s living
out his name like a job description.
This is when I know
I need to stand up and stop
being another head without body, a mind
plus fingers typing. Sometimes
when I’m walking down the street
a neighbor runs up to me to tell me
how Crossfit is working for her,
I press Skip ad until I see the real-time video
of Max, the dog who lives three doors down
and is dealing with depression
because his owner just died.
This is when I reach down
and wipe the goo from Max’s eyes,
and realize how much happier I am
when I sit in the middle of empty road
under an unlimited sky
holding a dog who has no idea
why his owner isn’t coming home.
If We Had Better Lighting, Our World Would be a Soap Opera
Global warming is more than me leaving
the heat on 80 degrees in the guest room.
There’s a shadow on our planet’s lung
and the narrow road is what we drive now
because half of it has slid into the ocean.
We are living longer, but we’re doing it with less
sex and friends. The view from here is gorgeous,
but who to share it with? I am watching the world
turn, all my children becomes all my adults.
I try to count our steps to the grave—5, 100,
1000? More? I’m less than optimistic.
I’m the character who is drinking wine
at noon in her nightgown. The soap operas
are failed decisions and mistakes are real life
choices. Global warming makes my cheeks
flush. Climate change is another way
to introduce myself, to undress and dive
into the ocean that wants to swallow me.
Let me cry dramatically before the scene ends,
let the director drag me to the shore.
Sunflower, What Have You Gotten Yourself Into1
Tonight a neighbor told me how climate change
was a hoax as we stood under an orange sky
from the smoke of wildfires and when he coughed
because the air quality was not good enough
for his lungs I said, It hasn’t rained for years
and when the birds started falling from the sky
he said, That happens sometimes, it’s cyclical.
God bless the confused, I said to the waves
reaching over into our yards, to the oceans
so warm the icebergs are the ice cubes
the barista places into our lattes, this should
cool it. And at night when I walk home
in a tank top because what was once a winter
is a mild spring, I lean back and watch the bats
circle and eat up whatever insects we have
too many of and I think my god, we fucked this up
so quickly, as I admire the moon that almost winks
at me, as if it knows how many years we have left.
1Title from a line by Kim Rashidi.
A Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World
Wild Persistence by Patricia Hooper
University of Tampa Press, 2019
Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00
Patricia Hooper’s fifth book of poems, Wild Persistence, is a beautiful and moving collection, mixing, as it does, dark and light, grief and wonder, and engaging us in her world, which includes the world of nature. Her forms range from haiku with surprising turns to blank verse that is plain and elegant. Her range is unusual—she gives us graceful poems, witty poems, complex ones, and powerful ones.
“Sightings” is a poem that demanded my attention from the first reading:
The world leafs out again, the willow first
and then the river birches near the road
we’re driving down, you in your car seat watching,
for hawks or smaller birds returning home.
Two years have passed since you could walk or stand
alone. The winter-damaged fields are sown,
and there, along the ridge, unraveling,
spirals of song birds, drifts of dogwood trees,
restored to blossom, beauty that breaks the heart.
And you whose spinal cord could not be healed:
you’re lowering the window, looking up
at miles of wings, your face alive with joy.
As we’re drawn into this car drive in spring, a bird-watching trip, the language is quiet, not calling attention to itself. Then those “winter-damaged fields that now are sown” make their entrance. The “you” is the speaker’s paralyzed grandson. Hooper has raised the stakes, and we feel her urgency with the “drifts of dogwood trees,” an injury that “could not be healed,” heart-breaking beauty, “miles of wings, your face alive with joy.” Clear images, deep feeling—the grandson’s wonder and the speaker’s joy and gratitude—this poem is also a gift to the reader in the way it finds beauty in the natural world even in the face of tragedy.
The word beauty sometimes takes a beating in the streets. I met a well-known poet who said in a disparaging way, Nay-chuh poems, as if it were a skin condition he thought had long ago been cured. However, Hooper’s poems go beyond the simple observational nature poem. Often, she starts with the plainest things. For example, in the book’s first poem, “Sketchbook and Journal,” she catalogues items found in her friend Dan’s freezer: “birds found dead along the trail / in snow ruts, autumn’s crevices, the wren / almost mistaken for a leaf.” The poem moves to Dan’s essays, other “sightings, swift details / that can’t be seen in flight, wild, secretive, / a voice, a look, a gesture half-concealed.” It ends with “wing-bars and stripes, the margins of a feather, / what the mind salvages to study later.”
In other poems, Hooper gives us an elegy for a son-in-law, a move from Michigan to the Piedmont, news of a grandson’s accident, a copperhead, nine birds, a spider, and an evening at a country inn. In a sometimes-witty haiku sequence, Hooper says, “I left those three crows, / the last corn in my garden, / and not one thanked me.” In “My Junco,” the bird has hit the speaker’s picture window with its “slate feathers and soft gray throat,” and she buries it by “those Whirlwind anemones / I planted under the oak tree / beside him— / next summer’s wings.” A hopeful, quiet walk-off.
In “August in the Little Field,” Hooper’s speaker addresses us and asks if we have “ever heard of a purpose as clear as this one . . ., the resolute persistence” of this goldfinch that all spring “flew back and forth over the meadow, watching,” then fed her offspring seeds all summer, as if knowing “the fields and their bright design. . . ,” / . . . her faith so simple / I could only wish it were mine.”
Hooper has aptly personified the bird and attached human fate to it. The poet Erin Belieu has said that Hooper’s feeling for nature reminds her of Mekeel McBride, who in fact provided a blurb for one of Hooper’s earlier books: “Craft and vision here, lighting from the inside the most common things.”
Hooper’s vision is complex, and this leads her to take a surprising point of view sometimes. In “Copperhead,” she writes in third-person about this snake about to strike in her garden—“its orange head lifted, / body a silk rope, / the hourglass bands around it like a bracelet.” These images are precise, almost pretty, but this speaker steps back for a shovel, thrusts it down, and the snake hesitates,
not long enough to see the rims of trees,
to see the houses leaning toward the hills,
to see the hills far off, the gray blue mountain,
to see the pink crepe myrtle in the yard,
to see the front porch with its pail of berries,
to see my knees blue-stained from berry picking,
to see the bare skin shining at my ankle,
to see, if it sees at all, the chance before it,
to see what I might see for the last time,
if no one came . . .
This is one of Hooper’s signature moments. The snake, almost outside of time, is allowed its point of view. The gaze moves to the sky, as if to evoke all the things the copperhead will lose. The feeling of distance here is odd, making the world slide sideways. The blank verse—easily readable and at the same time carefully crafted with alliteration, other sound ladders, and anaphora—gives an odd formality to the scene. The idea is complex, the language is plain.
In “The Spider,” we see “blowsy / overblown roses, heavy as hydrangeas,” then an empty spider web “tattered but glistening” in the speaker’s garden. “It’s strange, something dies, and the world stays,” she says. The speaker goes back in her mind to her childhood lake—not to the lake really, but to this moment after she, a girl, has returned to school in the fall and pictures “the dock, the sand’s hard ridges, and the waves still there without me, lapping at the shore.” This memory re-imagined, a frame inside the frame, gives this moment a poignant, unearthly quality.
Hooper has played this hide-and-seek game with the world throughout her previous four books. This strategy of up-close and far-away is a key to her craft and vision. In her first book, Other Lives, we have a surprisingly effective second-person point of view in “A Child’s Train Ride,” where the speaker is able to perceive the child’s thoughts about existence and non-existence. Now in Wild Persistence, we have “In the Clearing,” where Hooper’s speaker sits in the woods after rain, studying the light: “If I sit still enough / by the damp trees, sometimes I see the world without myself in it, / and—it always surprises me—nothing at all is lost!” No matter where she is in her own life trajectory, Hooper seems able to imagine the world without herself and her loved ones.
We also get powerful autobiographical poems mourning a loss, such as “After,” which begins, “After I left your body to be burned . . .” In a matter-of fact way, the speaker catalogues all of the details she has had to take care of. The poem ends with this speaker looking down from a great distance at all of the things in a house, as “if she were looking back from the next world,” an ending which seems to slam the door shut.
Sometimes her humor rests alongside solace. In “Sandhill Cranes,” two birds walk up to her window “in their scarlet caps.” The male sees his reflection and begins dancing: “his wings six feet across, / rose in the air / as he leapt in his black leather slippers, / his coat of feathers, / and pranced like an Iroquois brave to impress his bride.” The narrator expresses wonder and delight at their unusual “bowing and strutting” thinking “it was just in time / that they found their way to the house / in which I was grieving, . . .” gently reminding the reader of the poet’s loss.
There are some very witty poems in this book, too. In the heat of Hooper’s newly adopted South, her speaker says she sometimes thinks of “heroines / in southern plays or novels: sultry, steamy / women whose ways I didn’t understand / before—like Blanche du Bois reclining in a chair, / restless, desirous, half-daft, but barely able / to rise, to lift a hand.”
It’s hard to find any weaknesses to comment on, even beyond the particular aspects focused on here. Although I haven’t discussed Hooper’s poems that address the world’s injustices, they take their place in the story of her poetics and have contributed to the fact that her books have won a number of awards, including the Norma Farmer First Book Award, Bluestem Award, Lawrence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review, and most recently, for Wild Persistence, the Brockman Campbell Book Award from the Poetry Society of North Carolina. This book deserves such widespread recognition. And, perhaps, a re-examination of how far nature poems can actually take us.
Cooing & Longing
Cooing
A bird perched on the fence for a minute—
its cooing brought me out of the house.
There was so much color on its feathers.
Its beak didn’t jut forward but bent downward
like in most of birds of prey, but this one didn’t prey.
I couldn’t feed it so it left sooner
than it used to when you were here, no grains
to litter the compound with, but then
there was no kind of fodder in the house.
It was the kind of bird that knew its beauty—
perhaps a special thing for its species.
I had thought it would cut me some slack,
but, like you, it didn’t, fleeing on instinct;
like you, it left a trail of leaves in its wake.
Longing
I remember the first dry season I spent
in that house you lived in until you died.
Harmattan almost bent you double,
dragging in its dusty perfume across miles
and into every room, sparing nothing
so much so I never knew I would ever
be so expectant of rain; even the birds,
the animals were having a hard time
of all the charade that was the weather.
Even the wooden shelves cried as they cracked,
their grains warping into undulant hills.
I was addicted to the city life.
I tried to hide my feelings because
somehow the weather benefitted you.
You had never so stood at the window
with such longing, in your eyes, to be outside.
I looked into your clear brown eyes and tried
to will the young agile person I knew
who would walk miles with me merely to see
what the landscape was like at the moment
because, for you, no one stepped into
the same landscape twice, for you the wind
was always changing something, eroding
either the soil, or the trees of their leaves,
the rain would always wash something away;
even the cities could not escape this.
It was like a process of aging.
Sometimes the wind brought more than dust
and its empty smell: now a sweet smell
but one which you doubted: maybe it was
the smell of bodies carried over miles,
maybe the dust was part of their bodies.
I knew it couldn’t be real yet I let
myself to imagine it, as scary
as it was, for didn’t we hear about how
the rivers, though how dried up they were,
still vomited tumescent bodies
from their silvery bellies, about how
the beggars didn’t wake up in the streets,
their stiff bodies curled up like balls of wool?
I tried to find things to love in this place
but couldn’t, rather reasons to leave
were monthly stacking. Minna was almost
like this and each day the people I stayed with
tried to convince me to cut the place some slack,
I took a piece of my clothing and quietly
folded it and threw it in my traveling bag
until one night I realized it was full.
Evolution Kit
According to the manual, the “Theistic-Science World Building Kit” contains the following:
1. One forty-gallon terrarium (48″ x 12″ x 16″)
2. One shaker of “Evolution Mix” biosphere food (red)
3. One prepackaged rock to make the core
4. One shaker of “Planetary/Ecosystem Dust” (blue)
5. Something called “Matter,” which has the exact color and consistency of chalk dust
6. The Evolution Manual, as yellow and glossy as a school bus
The manual tells Katie that she should expect all life in her biosphere to map onto the evolutionary trails of Earth species. She can expect fish to crawl up on land, sprout into dinosaurs and birds: an inherited morphology spread throughout the ages.
STEP ONE: Pour Matter into biosphere and add one to five shakes of Evolutionary Dust.
STEP TWO: Begin.
Katie pours the chalk dust into the terrarium. She sprinkles a heavy dose of blue dust and a bit of red. It looks as though she has dumped food coloring into milk. The blue gains dominance, takes the red and drowns it. Katie imagines hydrothermal vents blasting within the rifts of the biosphere’s surface like primordial, cosmic wounds.
She does not regret her drunken purchase. The kit was purchased whilst shitfaced the night she got laid off. The package arrived on May 21st, which Katie remembers only because it was an ex-boyfriend’s birthday. The return address listed the town of Gammelstad, Sweden, but the box claimed manufacture in Stockholm, and the postage stamps revealed a journey from Oslo to Reykjavik to Paris for some reason to Reykjavik again to Halifax to Denton, Texas, where it found Katie’s front door. The return label said Play God Theistic-Science Company in block blue lettering, followed by a clip-art icon of a FedEx truck, even though the shipping service was a third party called Ilmarinen, Inc.
Katie adds more Planetary/Ecosystem Dust and goes to bed.
When she wakes, fish have formed in the theistic-biosphere. The terrarium is an aquatic underworld: jellyfish sway near the surface; shadowy agnatha—jawless fish—swarm at the bottom. Small, armored sharks with little plated spines of cartilage that the manual calls acanthodii appear. In the tank’s center, there is a tiny quadrant of shore.
STEP 3: So, you think you’re beginning to see fish.
Titaalik roseae, a four-limbed Devonian vertebrate fossil found in Nunavit, Canada is thought to be one of the first creatures to have walked on land from the sea. Both fish and tetrapod, the Titaalik supported gills, fins, a pelvic girdle, and partial wrists. Keep watching. The next step is dinosaurs.
Katie looks back at her terrarium. She wonders if the tiny creatures she sees emerging onto the shore resemble Titaalik, their toothy mouths gaping, marble eyes glistening like new olives.
The world around her but for these little creatures feels ill with the lack of hope.
It is sunset by the time there are dinosaurs. Evening coats Katie’s window in shades of blue. The dinosaurs are small at first, but by the time Katie is getting ready for bed, wings break through their scales in the most beautiful colors: Jupiter red, asteroid brown, Neptune green. Katie falls asleep in front of the terrarium.
In her dream a great wind blows through the house, far too powerful for her tiny dinosaurs to fly. To protect them Katie must huddle over the biosphere with a blanket around her shoulders, arms spread out like a mother bat, to block the wind.
When she wakes, the dinosaurs are the size of bumblebees, flying and bumping into the glass. One of them belches a candlewick cough of flame.
STEP 4: After archaeopteryx, notice mammals.
But there are no mammals, and Katie recognizes the dinosaurs for what they are: dragons. They buzz like trapped flies, spurting flame at each other. It is impossibly cute.
If any cryptozoological creatures appear, immediately implement World Extinction Kit (sold separately at a 15% percent discount with purchase of a second Theistic-Science World Building Kit).
Online, Katie looks up the Extinction Kit. There is a tiny rock that looks like an asteroid and a shaker of something called “Anti-matter.” There is no explanation as to why the dragons must die. Why can’t Katie have dragons instead of dinosaurs? She watches the dragons play with each other. They keep bumping into the glass. Katie opens the top of the terrarium.
One immediately begins to nest in the rafters. Another begins hoarding loose grains of rice in her pantry. It sits atop the rice as if on a bed of gold. Katie chucks the Evolutionary Manual in the trash. There is no real plan to a world, she knows this. Only chaos.
The terrarium is a dead planet now. No more creatures will appear. Katie wonders if the dragons feel like astronauts, like explorers. She wonders if they are triumphant or afraid. If the sound of her microwaving ramen sends a message of doom throughout the apartment. If they heave a tiny sigh of relief at the “ding.” She wonders what it feels like to have left behind the world of false order and live in the stars.
The Murder Hornet
can fly sixty miles in a day
& decapitate its prey
quicker than licking
honey off a thumb.
Size has its advantages.
& its costs. My mom
told me early I’d pay
for the size of my heart.
You feel too much, she said.
You want too much.
In the Love Addicts Anonymous
meeting, a white man in a gold ascot
said, I need to be devoured by love.
Devastated, I added, swallowed whole.
Murder hornets are efficient killers,
but is any torture more elegant
than chasing what you’ll never catch?
There was one time in my life
my heart felt right-sized,
quiet, & I was so at peace
I was invisible. The robin
thought I was a chair or tree
the easy way she cleaned
her feathers near my feet.
More often my feelings swarm,
a storm surge, how water alone
can warp metal, level a village.
When I keep feelings at bay
I appear okay, recalling
how Gulliver’s giant size
made him too dangerous
to keep.
Under the Shade of a Paradise
My artworks and projects focus on ecological subjects, expanding the uses of technologies and capturing environments that escape our sight. These images are samples of two bodies of works. One of titled Paradis, 2018-2019, and the most recent one Dusk/Daybreak, 2020. The images depicted in Paradis make us—the viewers—reconsider ideas of “paradise” with the use of images derived from tropical vegetation that intersect and overlap. Each print is carefully crafted through an experimental digital printing process. In Dusk/Daybreak, there’s an exploration of the landscape through a nontraditional photographic medium. Each print is made through a layering digital printing process. The images make account for the daylight transitions that allow for the visible and the invisible, uncovering mysteries along the Caribbean coast.
I create large-scale audio and visual installations, experimental digital prints, sound arrangements in space, and videos to recreate spaces, memories, and experiences using imagery of natural spaces as a metaphor to understand the complex and interconnected realities we all live. The sources that generate the artworks are mostly research-based in a digital form or archival material that serve to create the installations themselves. Images of obscure natural spaces and elements that define our intimate relationship to spaces—storage containers, sounds, voices, and songs of proclamations in the void—become the aesthetics of the work. Through my artworks and practice I am constantly confronting geopolitical issues, ecology, technology, the act of speculation about the relations that we create to spaces and natural environments. I am always underlining a conceptual framework that comes from my experiences as a Caribbean colonial and post-colonial being as it is in dialogue with the rest of the world.
Tomorrowland & Man’s Dominion
Tomorrowland
I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on land.
—Wernher von Braun on humanity entering space, Los Angeles, 1955–1957
Some days after work, I’d rent a speedboat
from Long Beach and hop it out to Catalina
for an evening dive. What a thrill every
time, the chill of sliding through blue skin,
descending down the long teal folds of fulgid
kelp. A bright humming brain of gold baubles
lifting braids to the sky like a praising willow
swaying in the sugared light. I was almost lost,
weightless and wondering through the ocean
with no one following me but the moon as it
rose to look upon its navel. Omphaloskepsis: to
consider the divine inside the belly. When Jonah
was ankle-sunk in stomach acid, he was learning
the volcano’s wrath that gave birth to land. I could
spend hours floating in the whale constellation,
that dark, starry sea of seas. The umbilicus of space
that ties us to the womb of ocean. I wanted a rocket
to break through the egg with its tooth, dislocating
heaven and earth’s denotations. When we first
fumble around in the moon’s cratered belly, what will
we call our new lexis? How will we learn to be in
the universe but not of it once we leave behind our
world? The mystical isn’t in the ecstasy of floating
through space, our fragile bones eroding, but in
bearing the burden of our attachment toward a
center. Peter met Christ on the water because
he wanted to be like him. I designed Lunetta to churn
out gravity for the future to meet the cosmic Christ.
Man’s Dominion
And don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there [space]. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and
he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.
―Wernher von Braun, 1958
Standing at the edge of the Yucatan
jungle, I felt an urge to just run
blindly into it. The adrenaline was like a
timpani drum roll, paving the entrance
for the brass. I hired a guide, and as we
pushed through curling palms, ferns, and
snagging vines, I swear I could smell the jaguar’s
urine on the trees it had sprayed, hear
echoes of the animals that had fled before it.
I could hear a mosquito filled with a pyramid
of blood. When we saw the jaguar,
I became quiet as space, holding every
sound against the butt of my rifle.
Like when I held the liturgy candle,
planning each step so I wouldn’t spill the wax,
trying to pretend no one was watching.
His fur was glistening jet oil, his gaping mouth
a range of snowcapped teeth. The God who
framed his symmetry pitch-dark dared to
lock my limbs into their grooves
as well. He meandered through the lushness as a black
hole against a canopy of stars, his gold eyes
moving like jumpy flying saucers
in a child’s sloppy flipbook. I aligned
the crosshairs half a meter ahead of him
and pulled the trigger like a prophet
releasing a message before the people were ready.
My throat felt as if I had swallowed too
much water. I strode through the mist
toward my trophy, the graceful carcass already
hazy with flies. I had my guide put it in the jeep
and drive me into town to have it skinned.
from the Bird Journal Series
27 Years, 42 Years, Backbone, and Stitched belong to the Bird Journal Series, a body of work exploring movement and migration due to climate change. As the human impact on the planet increases and pushes the world toward ecological disaster, both animals and people begin to move around the globe in new ways. Birds’ migratory patterns, and even their bodies, are changing in reaction to rising global temperatures.
It is important to me that each drawing, sculpture, or process work be able to stand alone, yet it is in unifying them as one installation that they become stronger still. Similarly, we as humans can and must work together, acknowledging our interconnectedness with each other and with nonhuman beings, to protect the future of the planet.
Life and Food
To the Elk
They were hanging it against the barn wall. The head limp to the side. With a snowmobile they had dragged the dead elk from wherever in the mountains the pile lay where it had been gutted. For this bloody spectacle.
“That’s a big fucking animal.”
The porch of the main cabin: Wyatt was there with her, and so was this man Dale from Seattle plus the three highballs in his veins. That’s a big fucking thing, Dale kept saying. This was at the ranch that was in Wyatt’s family. The Smith River was nearby. It was Thanksgiving night.
“They got one last year too,” said Wyatt.
“It’s bigger than a buffalo.”
Savannah was thinking of her father and brother and this same performance. They would return home to the triplex by the refinery, north-side Great Falls, with a carcass in the truck bed and blood dripping from the tailgate. And she was saying to herself, for this….
Up the porch steps came the hunters. They had been out all day and were covered in mud, and Savannah thought they smelled. Wyatt congratulated them and asked about the hunt. An uncle said they’d been lucky to shoot it from fifty yards. It ran a hundred and died, and a young cousin took the killing shot.
Wyatt’s uncles and cousins started applauding. They shook hands all around. Even in daytime she didn’t remember their names, and it was not daytime. The dark was long past gathering; it had mustered.
“Last year they got a bigger one,” Wyatt said.
By now the hunters had gone off to their different cabins to clean up.
“Bigger?” said Dale. “Bigger than that?”
“It’s missing half its rack.”
Savannah looked at the head again and saw only one antler.
“Do they spar?” asked Dale.
“I think they grind them against the trees,” said Wyatt.
“Not as impressive.”
“True.”
Speaking to her now, Dale said, “Let me ask. As a Western woman, does this arouse you? These men returning from the hunt?”
“I hope not,” said Wyatt. “I’m related to them.”
“I don’t mean the men. I mean the blood. I mean the sight of this big, beautiful dead thing.”
Savannah said, “I’m used to it.”
In fact by now—being from this region and educated in a different one (the opportunity belonging to so few from that refinery neighborhood)—she had a rule for herself: no dead animals or fresh-caught fish, not in real life and not in any photographs in any public medium, app or profile, or anything else. None of that spectacle would be permitted with regard to whatever partner or friend she kept. Wyatt’s pictures were full of other things: the neoclassical façade of the apartment building where he used to live in Missoula, an Old Fashioned in a bar in Chicago where his roommate from college played jazz guitar, a portrait in graduation robes and the sandstone arcade columns flanking him, that one now six years old and his hair (shorter back then) tousled from doffing the cap, the PBK cord helpfully around his neck in the foreground….
“Does it arouse you, Dale?” Wyatt asked.
“No, I’m so boring. No kinks for me. For me it’s all dollars and cents.”
“You’ve seen more blood than any of us.”
Seattle Dale was a political communications consultant. Fundraising was his higher function.
“Violence to me is writing a strongly worded email. But—I mean—you look at this, and you know these men can provide. I mean, this is vacation—it’s fun—for us. But—I mean—it’s something, something more.”
His tumbler was down to the ice melt.
“It doesn’t arouse me,” Savannah said.
A cone of light and warmth and festivity spiraled out like a dust devil when the door opened. A terrier called Sonny with long distinguished whiskers came out and trotted down the steps and went to piss on the snowy lawn. Inside, Wyatt’s aunts and mother, and his father also, were preparing the table. His father specialized in sweet potatoes.
When the little dog came back Dale went in for another drink and called the dog in using baby sounds. At last they were alone.
She watched Wyatt’s face. There was nothing there but anticipation for dinner and for his wine. She had looked at him before and had seen whole worlds where they would go together and more from which he’d come. A lick of dark hair came down out of the front of his cap. He put himself together well and tried to dress of his time, but it did not subsume him. Not too clean with the effort, his good shirt just a little too big. He liked big clothes. To have something fit perfectly—was that another of the things that would make him feel ashamed of his upbringing?
The glass against Wyatt’s lips now. Rare content passed through his eyes as he swallowed, the fire weeping in them. He made his deep voice go high and feminine. “Does it arouse you?”
“Ask me again,” Savannah said.
“As a Western woman?”
She moved to hit him, and his arm was around her.
“It’s cold.”
“I’ll get a fire going in our cabin.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I know it’s unbearable.”
“It’s not. It’s really not. I love them.”
There were many people she didn’t know. But at length you would know them. It was not being away from home, that wasn’t the difficult thing. Anyway you only had to get through dinner and then go to the little cabin and go to sleep. The drive had been beautiful, and they hadn’t argued.
She stood on toes to kiss the bottom of his neck.
“Do you really?” he asked.
Tears were in that question. Tears were good. And her rule was a good rule, a necessary rule to have for men. Education in history and politics had made her question whether it was for the better passage of life not to have relationships with men. That was a resounding theory up until graduation. Anyway, at minimum you had to have a rule you stuck with.
He went to wash his hands before dinner. When he was gone she admired for a while the dark mountain on the horizon above the ranch gate. The cold clean air touching her eyes, inflaming the veins. She didn’t look at the dead elk on the side of the barn. Then she went in for dinner.
—
The table was so crowded with people that her shoulders never relaxed. Her shirt went too low, she thought.
The food was very good. The green beans were perfectly seasoned. There were two turkeys; one was local and lean and the other was a butterball. They filled their glasses with red wine out of towering decanters. She was at the end of the table beside Wyatt. His father was at the head. She was across from his mother. It was a good meal. Everyone talked to each other.
“How come you didn’t want to hike,” the mother was saying.
“I thought I’d stay around and get something done,” said the father.
“Get what done?”
“Work. Caught up on emails.”
She watched Wyatt. He was drinking fast. She touched his knee under the table. His leg was vibrating under her hand. You could duck under these little breakers of talk like a child playing in the surf, but Wyatt was not possessed of that lightness. Later they would have to talk at length about it—whatever thing was said at the table that stood out to him as particularly abhorrent.
Things got formally quiet as everyone took turns saying gratefuls. The woodstove atmosphere and the gray iron of the gun barrels on the walls and the smell of the old rugs and leather furniture gave the quiet an oppressive quality like overwhelming heat, inescapable intimacy, absorbing silence into it.
From the other head of the table, “To the elk.”
“To the elk.”
“Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
“It’s special.”
“There are times you’re facing an animal and you’re not ready to take a life. It’s not an easy thing. To the elk. And to Harrison. He took the shot.”
She drank a little faster after the toast. When her turn finally came, she said, “Thank you for welcoming me. It’s a wonderful place.”
“To the ranch.”
“The ranch.”
They drank. All agreed—the ranch and the dead elk held all that was beautiful and dear. She didn’t look at any particular face; from having run meetings she understood how to look between people when addressing a table. She went on, “It’s been a good year. Better than I expected.”
Wyatt mugged for the crowd, and everyone laughed.
“Really, thank you for having me.”
Later they stood around the long kitchen island and ate the pie she had baked. She explained again to one of the aunts the decision they’d made to move in and what went into it. The uncle who had toasted the elk asked what she was doing for work and followed her answer with, “Do you work together?”
“No,” said Wyatt. “She works for a Dean. I work in Admissions. The worst office to be in right now.”
“It’s a good place to work,” she said. “I can do four tens in the summer when I want. The benefits are good. Campus jobs are nice.”
“When you add your union dues to the premiums you’re losing half a paycheck,” said Wyatt.
“But you can’t have one without the other,” she said.
“It’s beautiful how that works.”
“Can you run this up the flagpole?” the uncle went on. He had not listened. “Why the cuts to English? You can’t cut English. What’s the point of having a public college if you’re going to get rid of English?”
“English isn’t going anywhere,” she promised, wearily. Because she thought there was more than just the appreciation of literature in his concern for the survival of English.
“Well, run it up the pole if you can. It’s terrible what’s happening over there with the cuts. And Will Tunt retiring is a big loss.”
“It’ll get better,” she said.
“Enrollment always goes up when there’s a recession,” said Wyatt. “Folks would rather be in grad school.”
The uncle had taken several big bites of her pie. He told her how delicious it was and asked if she had made it herself, yes. After a long while the grown-ups were too drunk to stay awake and the teenage boy cousins had grown too weary for the world outside their heads and the girl cousins were sleeping in the corners cuddling with the dogs and it was over, she had survived it, and Wyatt was not saying anything else about the college where they worked and how it was a poor school serving poor students who were going to stay poor, and they were on their way out.
“Take Sonny with you,” said his father. Handed the terrier’s leash to his son. “Don’t worry, he’ll be good.”
Together they walked the little dog from the big cabin to the small cabin where they were staying.
While Sonny sniffed around at the base of the cabin steps, they sat on the porch, on top of a bench covered with a buffalo hide, and they looked across the lawn at the barn where the dead elk was hanging. Savannah wondered if it was going to start smelling.
“I wish I’d been out there to see,” said Wyatt.
“I don’t.”
“I mean to see it when it was alive.”
“I’m glad you weren’t there to see it get killed.”
They were holding each other. The wind moved over their faces, and they squeezed closer.
“Not that I want to hunt,” Wyatt was saying. “But you sort of wish that you knew what it was like.”
“I don’t. I don’t want you to be like,” she raised her voice and imitated Seattle Dale, “Harrison.”
“Me neither. I just wish I knew.”
“It was fun walking to the cliff,” she said.
The hike they’d done in the afternoon took them across the western expanse of the family’s great tract, past a tipi erected for ambience, to the edge of the river gorge. Fathoms down, you could see the frozen banks. In summertime you could swing from a hammock between two ponderosas with a cocktail in hand, maybe a book in your lap. This was how she imagined him.
Then she thought that the dead elk had moved, swung a little.
“It’s—” he started. “My dad didn’t know how to field dress an animal. His dad never taught him how to hunt. I’m not any better because I don’t do it.”
“It’s not about being better.”
“One feels somehow emasculated,” he said.
“Because you don’t know how to hunt?”
“Not exactly. I don’t think you’d get it. You remember Chuck asking what I do?”
“He didn’t ask you. He asked me.”
“But then he asked if we work together.”
“So.”
“I always have to prove my worth. That’s what I mean: I don’t think hunting is impressive. But doing something impressive is impressive. Knowing how to do things.”
“I don’t think that’s what Chuck meant.”
“I know my family.”
She didn’t want to argue. She said something about how it would be cold and unpleasant to have to go pee in the middle of the night, since the nearest outhouse was across the lawn, behind the barn with the dead elk. After that they went inside and got changed for bed; or, she did, and he started trying to make the fire.
The plush duvet cover was cold on her bare legs. The hairs stood up, and while she waited for the fire to start she was self-conscious of having prickly legs. Sonny was on the ground, sitting obediently and anxiously, watching her in bed. Wyatt was kneeling and using a hatchet to make kindling. Erratic banging shook the door when he wedged the blade into a crack and slammed a log against the stone base of the fireplace to split off flakes of pine. He built a pyre in the iron woodstove with newspaper and tinder and tried to get the flames started and took a long time to do it and tried opening and closing the flue and could not get it right.
“It’s so cold,” she said.
“Almost got it. I smothered it last time.”
“Maybe you could just get in with me.”
“No, I have to do this.”
She could fall asleep even when she was freezing, especially after enduring something. Enduring did make you tired, but it was alright to be tired because you could sleep easily. Her father had said to her once, do you sleep easy because you’re a princess?
She was almost in a dream and Wyatt was still working on the fire, and she felt Sonny climb up onto the bed and lay down on top of her feet, and her legs got warmer, and then she was all the way in the dream and almost asleep but still heard the newspaper flare up quickly and burn out each time he tried and tried, Wyatt still in the waking world.
—
Much later in the night she woke up because she had to pee. It was hot in the cabin. The fire was going, she did not know for how long, and the twin bed beside the queen was unmade but empty.
She pulled sweatpants on and went to the door and had to push it very hard till it flew open and slammed against the wall. No other noise out there. She saw the moonlight, bright on the snowy lawn, and the big cabin like an embalmed giant. She saw the elk, its fur matted and dark, and the tongue spilling out of its cracked mouth. Its open eye was black.
And Wyatt was sitting on the bench next to the cabin door. He was all in his winter gear, which he had formerly peeled off when he labored to make the fire, and his elbows were on his knees and his cheeks were in his hands, and he was undoubtedly facing to look at the elk.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“It’s not too bad.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“About what?”
He wasn’t wearing shoes. His bare feet were on the ground, his toes a few inches from the pastry-thin ice. He had taken off his thick wool socks and left them between his feet, inside out.
“What are you doing? Come to bed.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Come on. Don’t do this.”
“I’ll be in later. I’m sorry.”
Savannah recalled that she had to pee. Without answering the apology she went down the cabin steps. The sudden reminder, the pressure in her stomach returning to the front of her conscience, was as heat coming back into a room after a door is shut against winter.
She walked out over the snow. The dead elk grew larger and larger in sight the closer she came to the barn. The texture of its fur was nauseating, more than the smell of the outhouse.
Sitting down, she hated herself for the lapse. It wasn’t useful to be bitter about anything, but it had gotten to you anyway. The transference: you’d caught it just as it was done.
When she returned he had already gone back in. The socks remained. She picked them up and shook a little ice from them. In the cabin he was lying flat on the twin mattress, with hands folded on his chest. She got on the queen and pushed all the bad air from her lungs.
“Come on up.”
“Just calming down.”
It was the same thing. Civilized men would kill something, civilized men would watch. In his pictures the elk was there. Strung up between the arcade columns, its outline and ghost.
“Get in with me.”
After a minute he said, “Alright.”
There was love too, that was true. He was the product of a rule, an algorithm that had narrowed so many variables to her preference. They resisted the same things. Like the logs and pine flakes and newspaper it would keep the fire going, but also they would be consumed and used up. There was no rule concerning what to feel.
An Array of Possibilities
A Brief History of Fruit by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews
University of Akron Press, 2020
My copy of Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’ A Brief History of Fruit soon ran out of page corners to dog-ear. After reading each poem, I had to read it again; I didn’t want to misread any lines or miss any new words. And when I finished this collection, I returned to all the words I had circled, delighted not only by the poems in what has become one of my favorite collections of the year, but by how much they had taught me. A small sampling of the words this collection added to my vocabulary:
corrugate
brackish
bougainvillea
aqueous
whuffling
misprisions
copula
As I searched for my circled words, I found myself rereading each poem, and then the entire collection, in its entirety. It is a collection that rewards re-reading. Andrews signals her attention to the meanings of words—and asks for readers’ attention to the same—in poems such as “n: Shield, or Shell Covering”:
Swaddling provides a newborn with a sense of the womb’s safety.
I fold countries around myself, false familiarity, some serene carapace.
That “carapace” is the noun from the poem’s title: an object with a protective function, a kind of casing. But Andrews finds the tension between a swaddled baby and a suffocated self in a suffocating country in a way that feels both heartbreaking and necessary. The poem renders this tension using a series of long couplets drawn across the page, with the second line of each couplet pairing carapace with a rhyming, rhythmic, hypnotic sequence of modifiers: crystalline, serene, unseen.
In “The Collapse,” Andrews combines her playfulness about the meanings of words—“Ravine (n): a place where it is difficult to build condominiums”—with a formal inventiveness that uses the page as a way to think critically about what white space means in the poem and in the world. Through these formal choices, Andrews makes the connections between whiteness, capitalism, and ecological disaster both evident and non-negotiable. The poem opens with an epigraph about Manila’s infamous mountain of garbage, the collapse of which killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the summer of 2000. Andrews, though—whose mother was born in the Philippines—follows the epigraph with a passage that suggests an impatience with the need for storytelling as a rhetorical device:
Is it alright if I just go ahead and say
that the moral of this story
will have something to do with the scourge of capitalism? Will you keep reading?
This poem is frenetic and challenging, cataloging Manila’s financial growth and environmental ruin with an anger that at times transforms into reverence: “all hail the need for condominiums / all hail Manila’s 10,000 tonnes per day.” These images, stacked one on top of another, threaten their own form of collapse, mirroring the compounding pressures of capital and climate change.
If there is a feeling of helplessness that comes from the magnitude of the current disaster facing us, what Andrews does so well across the collection is face these impossible catastrophes. She arrives to the page with new ways to communicate loss, absence, and grief. The language with which we understand the climate change that may destroy us is also the language we use to understand the elements that give us life. Andrews converges these lexical groups in “Pastoral,” where words such as “environment” and “field” and “America” can and do hold a number of meanings:
By field, I mean both the expanse across which
[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []
and the sum of all possible relations between a person
and the objects in their environment
The punctuation of a double bracket [] translates to an array in JavaScript, and I think of array here as a kind of absence but also as the formation of possibilities, answers, and meanings—a box to be filled. The poem does not concern itself with sense so much as it does with sound, which props open the door to the poem. The arrays provide the fill-in-the-blank-ness necessary to push the reader toward a range of meanings:
By America, I mean the sighing sense of moving from body to
[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []
A Brief History of Fruit is inventive, textured, and deeply interesting. One of the many powers of this collection is the way it navigates possibility. Andrews writes into questions such as, How do we name ourselves? How do decide who we are? How does one name and navigate the world? These poems are fervent explorations of the capacity for language to name what can’t be named and to help us understand tensions that, as argued by Diane Seuss—who selected the collection as winner of the Akron Poetry Prize—do not “resolve; [because] to resolve would equal self-abandonment.” And to pretend to resolve the questions at the heart of this collection—for one, “What does it mean to live in a country?”—would be far less interesting than what Seuss rightfully says that Andrews does so well: to “inventory a parallel history.”
Pollarding & Animal Spirits
Pollarding
In this unwitting dawn. In the begonia
I put in the poem because of its incantatory
sound. In the vine I thought was a sweet
pea—to put a sweet pea in the poem—
but was actually a weed, common vetch.
In the still early summer heat like gentle
pressure on the forearms and wrists.
A trio of military planes screams overhead.
I squint into the glare and the leftover
cosmetic product on my hands flashes
in a type of dim recognition. Wash it off. Who
is going to read about botanical misprision.
There’s a war on and I am the yellowing
pages of Bishop’s National Geographic.
There’s always a war on and its location
is not a function of place but of people, plucked
for the vase or the oven, wilting or burning or
eaten as a delicacy. The word of the day
is upward. The word of the day is all cops
are bastards. Who am I to say what we should make
of the clay at our feet, minor gods with shovels
and grass seed, with kilns and molds, the joints of
our fingers curling around some texture, releasing
it in the checkout aisle or through the window
that backs the checkout aisle.
After adrenaline, a comedown just like any
other high. You’re sitting on the floor in a hoodie
and biting all the skin off your lips. Outside,
the day continues to mulch itself, there are
robins, someone is invoicing someone else
for another order of rubber bullets.
The symbolic vulture will not arrive
To hunch in the middle distance. Sorry,
I’m back now, I was on the patio this whole time,
my mouth is bleeding and the roar has faded
such that it might be mistaken for an air conditioner,
the mechanical hum of comfort
in deeply inhospitable environments,
a fueled and speedy monarchy, it’s coming,
I tell myself, get up, it’s well-rested and armed
to the teeth literally but also and importantly
for my purposes metaphorically, a giant blossoming
of dipshit noisemaking. It doesn’t have to go
to the office and it is responsible for the existence
of Phoenix, Arizona. I wobble on my feet
like a newborn anything. I am melancholic
about structures. Look: no matter what you grab
out of the kitchen drawer, it can be used
as a lever. In what follows, we’re on the side
of the ice, those tropical begonias be damned.
Animal Spirits
“If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.” —John Maynard Keynes
Enterprise withering on the vine. Enterprise left to rot in the sun.
Out of its carcass, a cooler wind—
/ / /
If the world is bad to you, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, but you know about the world, you are sad.
If the world is good to you, and you do not know about the world, you will not be sad.
If the world was bad to you but it is no longer, it is easy to forget about the world, and easy to
forget you were ever sad.
O dripping globe. What we’ve blamed
on the elements. On the accident
of our cells rather than the rapidity
with which we turn water to cement.
/ / /
The idea that the brain is the seat of the soul is older than most people think it is.
The history of naturalizing economic activity is exactly as long as you think it is.
We were made for money / / we were made of money
/ / /
Falling through a substrate,
the gentle “u” of the body as it faces upward. The hands and feet like a dancer’s, directional.
On the curb, a man turns over shovelfuls of dampened sand in a wheelbarrow. The sound is like
stiff fabrics hung too close to one another on a line. A recursive intimacy.
A brief and wild optimism, and then the grinding sludge of machinery, its unmatchable
excitation.
/ / /
A bull in the blood.
A bull made of blood, made of air, air carried in the blood air seated in the brain.
The brain a bull. The world a bull with its hooves on the world.
O beast that could be gentle. Asleep in the beige autumn of the shaken head, slow wading
through the pool of counter-liquefaction.
Abolish selling.
In the hand outstretched, these cool bristles
like a hand broom, a horned smoothness and the scent
of fields and a fire recently extinguished. This animal pause.
/ / /
Frenzied acquisition of undergarments,
small vases, linens, soaps, followed by the hatred of stuff—
/ / /
The dog on the surface of the water, the dog on the silver of the coin.1
1See Robert Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, on rabidity: “That in Hydrophobia they seem to see the picture of a dog still in their water” (222).
Interview: John Sibley Williams
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.
Daniel Lassell corresponded with Williams last year, near the release of Skin Memory.
Daniel Lassell for The Florida Review:
Your newest book, Skin Memory, has a lot of subjects and themes that emerge throughout the reader’s journey. I found many poems touching upon topics of family, parenting, loss, home, violence, privilege, and societal and ecological concerns—all of which seem to buoy, contrast, and converse with each other. Which was the subject/theme that compelled your poetry most when writing, versus which emerged most clearly when editing the collection for publication?
John Sibley Williams:
What an interesting question. It’s certainly true that during the editing process, while sifting through a hundred or more poems in search of common themes and structures, unexpected threads emerge that weave seemingly disparate explorations together into a single tapestry. Of course, each poem tends to incorporate more than one theme, using the overt to subtly imply a more foundational concern. For example, when discussing parenting, societal gender expectations or our destruction of natural landscapes may be seething beneath all that talk of cradles and lullabies. When I mention the freedom of youthful play, say swinging from a tire trying to toe the clouds, that same tree will likely be shown in an ugly historical context. No poem can be boiled down to a singular theme. So, in this regard, editing isn’t so much trying to force pieces together as it is recognizing the varied themes in each poem and seeing which, both overt and implied, belong together. A collection should read like a river, not a puzzle. In a way, it’s an act of witness. And, at least for me, this isn’t dissimilar to my writing process. I never set out to write a particular kind of poem or to explore a specific theme. They emerge naturally, as if the connections were already there waiting for me to see them. All we can do is write about what haunts us and to do so as authentically and with as much vulnerability as possible. Every theme you mention was equally important, was equally a driving force, behind both my writing and editing.
TFR:
“A collection should read like a river, not a puzzle”—I love that. And Skin Memory certainly does read like a river too, easing readers between poems as if on a raft, encountering rapids and wet clothing along the way. Poetry acting as witness is a beautiful thought as well. It makes me think more specifically of your poem, “Death Is a Work in Progress”—a heart-wrenching portrayal of a mother, the decline of the human body. It harkens back to your earlier collection, Disinheritance, which explores this subject of mortality in great detail. Can you speak a little more to this relationship between parent and child, life and death, in your poems? It seems to be a theme in your work that you return to often.
JSW:
I’m thrilled that you recognized these overarching themes across multiple books. In the end, we write about what haunts us, what keeps us up at night, what stalks our mind’s periphery, just out of sight, emerging from the darkness to remind us how fragile we really are. A bit like wolves, perhaps. And what better way to explore fragility than through discussions of the body and our intimate relationships? I’m terrified of no longer existing. Like everyone else, I’ve lost and know that the more I love, the more I have to lose. There’s this double-edged sword, this balancing act, between wanting to open my heart to the world and fearing such an act’s consequences. And I fear my own body, how it will naturally react to age and disease. But it’s exactly this impermanence that makes each breath, each embrace, each poem meaningful. So, I suppose, most of my poems to varying degrees try to walk that tightrope. Skin Memory includes poems about my children, specifically the traits I may be passing down to them, that were passed down to me. It speaks of my father, whose father was a rough man, and how all that tumbles down to my own young son. And, with “Death is a World in Progress” and many of the poems in Disinheritance, I witness the steady mental and physical deterioration of my mother. These are simply different lenses through which I consider the same central question. I just can’t tell if I’m not loving enough, or loving too much, and what the full consequences to either are.
TFR:
Indeed, Skin Memory does resonate in all of these areas. As a father myself, I am increasingly drawn to poems that hold the subject of parenthood in conversation. Having spent time with your earlier books and reading up to your most recent collection, it seems that since becoming a parent, you might have undergone a personal shift. Of course, any artist should evolve in their art; but I also recognize a palpable difference between Disinheritance and As One Fire Consumes Another, which published in Spring 2019. Not to digress too much, but was Disinheritance written before or after you became a parent? As One Fire Consumes Another seems to drive more of a political message than your earlier work does (at least more overtly). No doubt it has much to do with our political moment, but Skin Memory also seems to act as a continuation in this focus. How would you characterize your poetic growth over time?
JSW:
I agree with you that, as writers, we should try to push ourselves into new, often uncomfortable themes. Growth is probably inherent to writing for a long period of time, but I still worry about stagnation, by which I mean writing about the same themes in the same tone using the same structures. It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing what about what we’re already comfortable with. As One Fire Consumes Another was an attempt to break out of my comfort zone by focusing, to a degree, on our current cultural and political climate. But, more importantly, I meant to explore my own place in that culture, which includes culpability, guilt, privilege, and family history. Skin Memory continues on those themes, though less directly, incorporating my my children and mother, with a greater degree of intimacy. I feel Skin Memory exists somewhere between Fire and Disinheritance. Structurally also, as my earlier work was predominantly free verse, Fire… was newspaper column-like prose poems, and Skin Memory incorporates both, with the addition of more standard prose poem structures. So, in terms of growth, I feel experimentation is key. Sure, plenty of poems end up on the cutting room floor. Not all structures I’ve played with ended up feeling authentic to my voice. But we have to keep pushing, testing, and rethinking our preconceptions about our own work.
As it pertains to parenting, I’m not really sure how my work has changed. I write less, sleep less, can concentrate less. Raising twin toddlers is even more exhausting than I could have imagined. But within the stress and anxiety, I have expanded my definition of love to such a degree that I can no longer say I’d experienced it before my kids. My heart is more troubled but fuller.
TFR:
I think “more troubled but fuller” is a profound way of describing the interconnectedness of parenthood and love. And I hadn’t considered Skin Memory as a balance between Fire and Disinheritance until just now, but it sort of is. It’s the wave that settles after the body enters a bathtub. If we can, I’d like to explore your thoughts on the prose poem, since you mentioned form. My first poetry teacher was David Shumate, known for his prose poems, so my introduction to poetry is inextricably tied to this form—I’ve come to feel at home in it. But for others, the prose poem might represent or conjure apprehension, confusion, distain, etc. In Skin Memory, there are several poetic forms other than the prose poem, but I’m interested in why—when selecting the right vehicle to meaning—the prose poem felt like the best fit.
JSW:
Well, apart from the poems in Fire and Disinheritance, which were a set structure, I don’t begin a poem knowing in advance what it will look like on the page. I often experiment with various arrangements before, for whatever intuitive reason, something clicks and the poem screams, “This is my form; this has always been my form!” So, the simplest answer to your question about knowing when a prose poem is the best vehicle for a particular piece is, well, intuition. But, to be more precise, a lot of it, for me, has to do with three things: flow, the tension created by line breaks, and the sound of the poem when real aloud. Poems that are more fragmented or dense with metaphorical imagery may require more white space to allow a reader to digest each line, place it in its larger context, then move on to the next line. Other poems, especially narrative ones rich with connected imagery that doesn’t take as many huge leaps in logic, may thrive more with longer lines. But even this simple answer isn’t really accurate. Sometimes abstractions can be squeezed together, running one into the next with no room to breathe, to create the desired flow. Sometimes a straightforward narrative can be shattered and reassembled into something visually unrecognizable. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is that: flow. How do I want the poem to read? Should it drive, propel? Should it strike with short staccato knives? Should it slowly, steadily paint a massive portrait out of smaller components? All this leads me back to intuition. Our ears know how a poem should be read. Our eyes know what the poem wants to look like. Listening closely and equally to both seems to strike the right balance, at least for me.
TFR:
You certainly do seem to have an intuition for what works on the page. This attention to flow, or cadence, seems to drive a lot of the poems of Skin Memory. Is there ever a disagreement between these two realms of the page and the tongue? In developing your intuition, does this mean finding a comfortable balance between your voice and poetic style? How does one develop their intuition?
JSW:
I think creative intuition simply comes from writing and studying others’ writing for so long that that various elements (and organs) learn to listen to each other. Over the years and decades, you learn to step away from yourself and trust the page. The poem begins to speak to you before it’s even written. Of course, all of this is an internal process, but it begins to feel as if your poetic decisions are born of an outside force. I wonder if that’s what some people call “the muse.” But it’s really just muscle memory. It’s having failed and failed and occasionally succeeded for long enough to unconsciously recognize when a poem is working and when it’s not. It’s the ear and eye thriving in a symbiotic relationship. Less and less of our creative decisions become conscious ones. We just know. And, sure, given the subjectivity of any artistic work, we still fail plenty. But I have found most of my newer poems that don’t quite work fail because I inserted myself into them; I didn’t shut up and listen to what the poem wanted to say.
Perhaps because of this “trained intuition,” I rarely find discord between the appearance and sound of poem. They both come pretty naturally, without me having to force it much. Admittedly, in trying to push myself, I do experiment with structures I end up abandoning because they don’t look or flow right, but I usually recognize this incongruity early on and find a more fitting structure before poem’s end. For sound, part of my composition process involves reading aloud every line over and over to ensure the lines that follow match the auditory tone and rhythm. Our ears know what sounds awkward.
TFR:
That makes sense. Somewhat relatedly, what are your thoughts on the accessibility of poetry?
JSW:
That’s a great question, and one on which opinions vary greatly. I suppose the subjectivity of “accessible” can be cause for this divide. For example, many have argued that down-to-earth poetry that paint personal narratives with clear, everyday language is the cornerstone of “accessible” work. By that definition, I suppose I prefer more challenging literature. That’s not to cast judgment, as such work is indeed valuable and is many people’s introduction to poetry. It’s all a matter of personal resonance. But I feel this common description limits the definition of the word. There’s also emotional accessibility. Even if a poem is fairly abstract, surreal, or bursting with what Robert Bly called “leaps” in logic, that emotional core that unites the disparate elements can be accessible. That heartache, grief, turmoil, doubt, celebration. That bit of light that filters through and puts into perspective darkest night. Even without a followable narrative or commonplace language. To me, that is the kind of accessibility I enjoy reading and tend to write toward. It’s that honest, vulnerable, universal core question, around which the other poetic elements whirl, that makes all poetry, regardless of its structures and rhythms and themes, inherently accessible.
TFR:
I like that way of looking at it, and indeed there are several opinions out there. For me, I tend to go back and forth. I agree that challenging literature can be fun, and doesn’t have to be the first form of poetry someone encounters. On the other hand, word choice is one of the things that separates poetry from other written art forms, and therefore, word choice is what makes and closes off meaning. In this vein, when a poet intentionally closes off meaning, it becomes a question of whom is getting closed off from that meaning and why. In this realm, I guess a discussion of accessibility can’t go without acknowledging privilege too, as we are both white males. In this modern age, how should a white, male writer compose poetry? It seems like there’s a duty to explore and dismantle our own privilege in art—and in living in this world more generally. The poems of Skin Memory do their part to confront difficult realities, privilege being one of them. For example, “On Being Told: White Is a Color Without Hue,” “We Can Make a Home of It Still,” “On Being Told: You Must Learn to Love the Violence,” and “Inviting Fire in Northern Michigan in December” all seem to interrogate privilege in some form. Even the book’s title encourages an exploration of racial and societal disparities. How and when does it make sense for a poet to rail against their own privilege in writing?
JSW:
This could not be a more crucial question. Privilege comes in so many forms, most invisible until you shine a light on them and see their hazy edges. Gender, sexuality, race, religion, socio-economic status, family status, and even these have gradations. They all combine to give us a cultural advantage or disadvantage, and exploring my own advantages and how they contrast against those born or raised without them is a central theme of my work. Even when it’s not overtly discussed, as it is in the poems you referenced, that recognition of privilege and what it means as an individual and a member of a larger community hums beneath all my poems. In the end, it all comes down to a mixture of self-awareness and empathy. It’s a balancing act between witness and action. All of us whose privilege allows us the space to write freely, who aren’t judged by superficial qualities, who needn’t fear police or politicians or bosses who could withhold that one paycheck that makes our children go hungry, we need to investigate how we got where we are and what we can do to expose such inequities. The question is how. How does one explore privilege from the inside out? Often met by controversy, some privileged poets have chosen to adopt another’s voice, to attempt the persona poem. I feel confident that these attempts are well-intentioned. However, I don’t feel that’s my place. If I have not suffered as so many others have, who am I to speak in their voice? Instead, I write about privilege in two ways, by discussing my own safe white lineage and by writing about others (instead of writing from another’s point of view). And when writing about others, I don’t hide the fact that my perspective is inherently tinged by privilege. That’s what I mean by combining self-awareness and empathy. So, in short, I passionately agree with you about the necessity for poets to consider their own privileged status in their work. However, all this said, I don’t believe in shoulds. Who am I to demand every poet write about these themes? If a privileged poet writes exlusively about gardens and alders or the grief of a loved one’s passing, that is their choice. We write what we need to write. And not all of us need to write about our privilege. But I do. It’s one of the ghosts that haunts me. The only way I’ve found to deal with it is by looking it square in the eye and admitting my role in its creation.
TFR:
Thank you for your thoughts in this area. “A balancing between self-awareness and empathy” describes well, I think, what poets of privilege can do in their work. And I know the topic of privilege can be a difficult one to broach, since it’s one that touches every aspect of people’s lives (and indeed, we as white males do bear a shitload of culpability for the wrongs of this world). For this reason, I do think it’s a conversation worth having. As more underrepresented voices continue to enter the literary firmament, how best could writers of privilege welcome them? What new voices have you read recently that you’re super excited about?
JSW:
The literary establishment has been making great strides but still has much more to do before underrepresented voices become as mainstream as those voices that have dominated our landscape. I don’t work within that establishment so cannot speak to the steps they are taking. I have read articles critical of how major journals and organizations still approach underrepresented poets, and I continue to hear such stories from peers who have attended national poetry conferences and felt tokenized. Luckily, it seems many presses and organizations are opening their doors wider than ever before in terms of offering awards, open reading periods, specific book series and issues, and other avenues open exclusively to underrepresented poets. In terms of what you and I can do, I have spent the past few years reading almost exclusively books by contemporary poets who do not fit the traditional white, male, CIS, able-bodied model. And these are the authors I teach in workshops and classes in hopes of opening students’ eyes and hearts to new perspectives on culture, identity, and politics.
I don’t even know where to begin a list of my favorites, but here are a few I feel everyone should become intimately familiar with: Ada Limon, Tracy K. Smith, Jericho Brown, Fatimah Asghar, Tarfia Faizullah, Jenny Xie, Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, Safia Elhillo, Joan Kane, Abby Chabitnoy, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, whose book Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018) is one of my all-time favorite collections.
TFR:
I agree that expanding one’s knowledge of the world through reading is a great place for anyone to start—and for those in teaching roles, assigning a wide array of literature that both includes diverse populations and challenges traditional norms is an equally important approach. And what an amazing list of poets you’ve shared, too. We truly are living in a golden age of poetry right now, Skin Memory included. Before we close, are there a few lines from Skin Memory that you’d like to share for readers new to your work?
JSW:
Well, in keeping with the themes of our conversation, I’d like to choose two selections that deal with privilege, history, and my responses to them.
The first is from the collection’s titular poem, “Skin Memory,” in which I address the incredible Inupiaq poet Joan Kane and wonder about the effects of my race’s privilege as compared to how her culture has been treated.
Because you are what song breaks open your throat and because
the same century burns a different mark into me. For now I can just
listen. To how choreographed our forgetting. To the dark little
narratives of this is mine / yours, in that order. Can you sing this
country its name?
The second is from “There is Still,” in which I investigate Mark Strand’s celebrated closing lines from “Keeping Things Whole”:
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
In response, my poem explores time and privilege in recognizing how, while swaying in a tire swing, the speaker realizes that same tree may have been used for different kinds of…rope. And it changes the way he approaches the tree…and himself. The final lines of “There is Still” read:
We / all have reasons, Mark. I hope I am / swinging to remember.
Invasive
Then there was no more singing.
All the lights in their throats cut:
the protest of evening wolves & black
bears nuzzling a parched creek for any-
thing that might sustain them another
white-skinned winter, those foreign
birds we never learned the names for.
Invasive, my grandfather called them.
Like the silver carp haunting our
local river. Bullfrogs & possums.
He called us natives after living
three generations on the same
hard land it took so much blood
to own. At the end of the path
the bullet takes to meet the right
body, the right body drops like
nothing worth losing sleep over.
It’ll cost two men three hours
to drag it home in one piece.
That wilder silence lasts but
a brief eternity. Before the unseen
choir shakes the forest. Again,
the same damn wolves & starlings. Men
still dragging. The season closing.
Its wiry legs kick & quiver in our hands.
Like strings. Song. Our song now to sing.
King Speaking
“King Speaking” is a sequence excerpted from the latter half of a book-length erasure, Her Read, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. Her Read reconceives the entirety of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931), a highly regarded exploration of art from prehistory to the modern era by British art and cultural critic Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency, zero womxn artists are included in the early editions of this text. In 1951, Barbara Hepworth becomes the sole female artist to be admitted.
I began this makeover summer of 2016, in that pre-election heat, when rage at the latest iterations of hate on the American political stage, in conjunction with erasures playing out in my own life, made other writing seem impossible. From the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I began excavating a first-person lyric, the imagined voice(s) of womxn artists.
The concept of “mastery” appears with frequency over the course of the book, issues of dominion—that is to say—control—over a medium of expression, over other humans, and of course, over the Earth. One may well ask, what is art but a pronunciation of mastery? One may ask, must it always be?
Though I call this erasure, collage is a more accurate descriptor of this late excerpt. The surgical reconstruction contrasts cruder, monochromatic pages early in the text—used canvases treated only with correction fluid. As the book advances, the speaker gains agency over the text, revising the rules to serve to her fluencies. One rule is not broken: all language excavated and redeployed in this text can be harvested from a single copy of Read’s seminal text.
Materials: source text, correction fluid, archival inks, bookbinders glue, florist tissue, window shades, general purpose thread, embroidery floss.
Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull)
Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying
the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found
in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,
we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,
and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around
its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.
This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.
Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them
I. CAGE ITEMS
This box should be fairly heavy. The door
never needs opened or undone. Bend the rim
into a square. Little danger to your
self—the room to be afforded him.
A looking glass hung up by a small chain—
your pet’s vanity exceeds belief. A
flimsily made affair is soon bitten
to pieces. Body of a cage. Many a
good monkey is killed by swallowing
fragments of glass. Rub on a coat of
maroon. A little ornamental topping.
Or Venetian Red, most suitable of
colors for a cage. All that remains
is to procure your monkey and put him in.
II. CLASSIFICATION
From the time my fingers were big enough
to manufacture fly-cages with hollowed
cork and pins—all other lines of
fancy well threshed out—Simians have held
great fascination. The schoolboy’s definition
is “the plural of monk.” Or humonculous.
Much is lacking in what might have been
told. I cannot pin. Great naturalists
have labored to show a relationship.
I cannot pin my credibility.
Below the average human idiot’s,
the head of a chimpanzee. I am drifting.
What might have been. A fertile source of
drollery. My fingers were big enough.
III. AILMENTS
Disease—Symptoms of Indisposition—
Quinsy—Good Riddance—a small apple
hollowed out—Toothache—Headache—treat him
as you would a child—Useful Article—
as you would—Broken Limbs—a human
being—Rheumatism—Rupture—Risk of
Being Bitten—first he should be en-
veloped—Treatment—in a bag—Costive-
ness—Biliousness—Monkeys Eating Their
Own Tails—a ready sale is better than
the nuisance—Excrement—the “Kill or Cure”
Treatment—treat him as you would a human
being—Simple Remedies—a small apple hollowed
out and plugged again is greedily devoured
IV. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Savagely grabbed, the hand that has fed and
petted him all along. The very moment
novelty is lost, sit and write off an
advertisement to Exchange and Mart,
Bazaar. I haven’t always had the heart.
A passing menagerie generally
has a vacant cage. With an iron bar
a sharp and heavy blow. An exceedingly
human-like affair. As if we all of us
come at last to this. In skinning him
yourself you’ll find his hide fairly tough.
Put him in a natural posture. A bit
of dried moss, artificial leaf you might
purchase at the milliners. Keep him in full light.
The source material for these pieces is Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them, Arthur Patterson’s 1888 handbook, which was published in response to the colonialist British fashion of adopting exotic animals without any idea of how to properly provide care for them. These poems erase and rearrange the text into sonnet form. The poems were originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and were the winner of the Humboldt Poetry Prize.
Foliate Light
My endeavor is to pursue a photographic image that embodies natural and immediate expression. My aim is not to produce the sensational or the intellectually novel, but to validate a point of encounter, a tenuous fragment or impression.
The beginning is often a highly chaotic and kinesthetic activity in the process of discovery. I acknowledge a kind of readiness for images more so than the existence of a muse or the notion of inspiration. This readiness requires looking intently at my surroundings; a humility of purpose and acceptance; and a quiet, though often exasperating patience. I do not seek a particular image but rather encourage the image to arrive at my threshold. I allow the light, shadow, color and composition to form organically, in a place somewhere between a vibrant reality and the recesses of my unconscious. I relish this elusive aspect of emergence and honor this transient beginning.
Each photograph evolves in its own unique manner. There is no delineated, predictable order or destination; there are few preconceptions. The initial inception is expanded, combined with newly discovered associations, and gradually finds a voice of intent. Even though I encourage states of intuition, ambiguity, and randomness, I must acknowledge that defining formal or aesthetic decision-making occurs; my creative process is not purely automatic. Formal devices are employed to clarify and strengthen that emotion which first compelled me to photograph. However, any analytic construction is subordinate to the original gestural responsiveness.
In the final image, when the photograph is delivered to the viewer, it is transformed into a new, autonomous existence. And, at its best, the image retains the freshness and spontaneity of the original vision.
Freebirds
My mother calls to tell me she cannot get on the plane. She has had a premonition.
“You’re going to crash?” I sit upright in bed, sheet clutched to my chest. When she says stuff like this, my skin gets crawly.
“Not exactly a premonition.” She sighs. “I can’t say what will happen. A foreboding. Emmy, I’m not thinking straight. I can’t zip up my suitcase. And I wanted to get out of here so badly.”
“Are you sure it’s the plane?” I look to my left where the baby is sleeping in her bassinet. I look to the right where my husband is sleeping in our bed. “Could you be foreboding something else?” I say as I tiptoe out of the room, which is not actually a room. We put up a wall in the studio after the baby was born.
No, says my mother, she’s sure it’s the plane, and of course, I could try to reason with her. I could tell her to go ahead and pack that suitcase, get in a taxi, buy a tea and sit at the airport, see if the foreboding recedes. Until she’s actually on the plane, she has not committed to anything. Instead, I say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Because really, what should I tell her to do? Get on the plane and then the plane crashes and then she’s gone and then it’s my fault? Because planes do crash. They do.
In the background, at my mother’s house, radio voices are murmuring. “I have to think,” she says. “I’ll call you back.”
—
As soon as I hang up the phone, the baby is up. By up, I mean that she’s screaming. She’s always screaming and we don’t know why. I don’t know why. My husband comes out of the bedroom and hands her to me. “I have to go,” he says.
“It’s six thirty in the morning.” I follow him into the bathroom. He’s a real estate broker, which means that he works on commission, which means that the more he works the more money he makes, at least in theory. I’m no longer sure I buy this direct correlation. He works seven days a week. Before we had a baby, this wasn’t a problem. But now we do have a baby.
I sit on the toilet, bouncing the baby in my lap, while my husband brushes his teeth. “My mother might not be coming,” I say.
He spits into the sink. “Is she sick?”
“Sick in the head!” I say. “You’d think she’d want to see Eva. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with this delightful creature?” I kiss the top of Eva’s head, which is covered in the silkiest hair, soft and ticklish on my lips. She smells like a baby, like white soap and milk. She likes to be bounced, likes the sound of the water and the echo of our voices in the tiny chamber of the bathroom. She and I spend a lot of time in this bathroom. On the rare occasions when she is content and awake, I adore her so much I want to stuff her whole hand in my mouth. Both hands at once.
My husband is sliding the stroller out of the way to get to the door when my mother calls me back. “I’m in line at security,” she says.
“What changed your mind?”
“I’m a fifty-four-year-old woman. I cannot live my life in fear.”
—
I spy her on my building’s doorstep, from four stories up. She is covered chin to foot in a camel-colored, fur-trimmed coat. Her bright blond hair spills over the collar. Since the divorce, she has made herself thin and sort of glamorous.
She is also late. More than two hours late. Thirty minutes ago she called from a taxi to say she was on her way but couldn’t talk. Before that, I was very worried. Fear gnawed my stomach from the inside out. I called the airline. The plane had landed safely, on time. So if something had happened, it had happened only to my mother. Baby in my arms, growing heavier by the minute, I paced the apartment. What had she been foreboding? A car accident? A fainting spell?
“I met the pilot,” she says, over coffee, at the cafe around the corner, Broadway and 100, where we have settled ourselves at a cozy table. The baby is asleep in her stroller and I am actually drinking my coffee, my guard down, more relaxed than I’ve felt in weeks. If I need to use the bathroom, my mother can stay with the baby. If the baby wakes unexpectedly, perhaps she can even hold the baby.
“He’s a very nice pilot.” She pauses. “He’s not actually a pilot.”
“What is he?”
“He’s a flight attendant.”
“How did you meet a flight attendant?” I say, pleased by the inanity, the frivolity of this conversation. Really, I am pleased to be having any conversation. I am so happy my mother is here and I am not sitting alone.
“It’s a long story,” she says. “But when I called you from a taxi, it wasn’t really a taxi.”
“What was it?” I say, stupidly, my brain dulled by motherhood, perhaps, which is what happens to you, they say.
“He keeps his car at the airport. He was kind enough to give me a ride.”
“If he gave you a ride, you should have been early. Or at least, not two hours late.” I pause, comprehension forming. “What did you do in his car? Mom?”
“Oh my goodness, nothing like that!” My mother flushes. “But he was very nice. We had a wonderful conversation.”
“That’s great,” I say and I mean it and I would ask for more details, such as whether she’s planning to see him again, but the baby is starting to stir. I watch her like I’m watching a bomb about to explode. Except, if a bomb were about to explode, I’d run. My mother is distracted. She hasn’t noticed yet. I stand from the table. “I’ll be right back. Could you watch her?” I don’t look back.
—
The last time my mother came to visit, I was very pregnant and my mother was the thinnest I’d ever seen her. She was on a mission. According to her surgeon, you were not supposed to touch your face until you had achieved your ideal weight. This was the reason she hadn’t gotten a mini-facelift years ago. For years, she was a slave to her daily pint of pecan ice cream, until, one day, she wasn’t. One day she realized she could live and thrive on little more than lettuce.
“Don’t lose any more weight,” I told her. “You’re thin enough.”
My mother patted my shoulder. “Don’t take this personally, honey, but your perspective might be a little skewed.” She was very concerned for me and how unwieldy I must feel, how uncomfortable I must be in my swollen body. But I thought I looked fine, maybe better than I’d ever looked. I’d asked her to wait a month before visiting so she could be in town for the birth, but she said she could not push off her trip because she needed to schedule her surgery before the doctor’s schedule was full and she really wanted to get my feedback before she made her final decision. There were so many options, she said—facelift, brow lift, botox. “We could Skype,” I said but she shot that down quickly. She needed me to see her in person, the texture of her skin, the full 360 degrees.
She had not been to the city in a while, since before the divorce. Like a flower, you could see her drinking in the energy; you could see her bloom. Smohio, Ohio, she said, she loved everything about the city, the noise and the streets and the interesting little apartments.
“When you were a baby,” she said, “we lived in an apartment like this.” I knew this story. Living in that apartment as a hopeful young wife was a shining time for her. Dad was gone all day, a low-level administrator, not yet the boss. The days were just us, playing in the complex playground, walking to the mall next door. She loved to tell how there was a hole in the fence between the mall and the complex, two missing boards. The shortcut saved ten minutes walking, a lot in the winter. The geometry of it was tricky, but after many attempts, she figured out how to take me out and angle the stroller through just right.
On that trip, we were both waiting, preparing for a big change. In the mornings, I put on my one pair of dress pants with the stretchy panel and took the train to my boss’s office in midtown East, where I worked as an executive assistant. In the afternoons my mother and I wandered the city in the late September heat, shifting from one café to the next, where I would sit back with my hands on my belly, under which I could feel the baby moving, poking and pushing from inside of my body, and my mind was overtaken with the strangeness of this, I couldn’t really think about anything else, but my mother’s mind was somewhere else. When the waiters came to ask us if we wanted something to drink, she’d be pulling at her face, lifting the skin with her fingers, asking if this was too tight or not tight enough. I wanted to be able to tell her that she looked fine how she was, but the truth was, she looked so much better, younger and fresher, when she lifted up her face.
A week after the baby was born, she backed out of her facelift, paying a steep penalty for the cancellation. She spent her deposit on a peel and fillers instead. “I’d love to come see how you look,” I told her. “But I really can’t leave this baby.”
Now, in the bathroom mirror, I look at my own face, which would look better with a little makeup. I luxuriate in the ease of washing my hands and smoothing out my hair without a baby tucked under my arm. I feel so light and unencumbered I could fly straight up to the sky.
—
When I get back, the baby is screaming. I hear her before I see her. The sound of her cry is the sound of pure uncomprehending terror. She always sounds like this when she cries. Are these her authentic emotions, I wonder, or is she the girl who cries wolf all day long?
“Where were you?” says my mother, thrusting her into my arms.
People are looking at us. “Let’s go,” I say, as I bounce the baby up and down, bouncing her into oblivion. She quiets and falls asleep. I put her hat on her head and zip her into my coat, which is about three sizes too large for me, chosen because she and I will fit in it together.
On the street, I secure the baby to my body with one hand and push the empty stroller with the other. We trudge uphill and duck our heads against the blustery wind. Snowflakes swirl in the air.
“I think I’m finally ready,” my mother says, “to go back to work.” Now she is skinny and presentable; she has plans to expand her hypnotherapy business, to move from one-on-one sessions to larger seminars on stopping smoking and losing weight. She’s had to stop seeing most of her personal clients because they were getting too personal with her—they told her too much and made her worry at night, made her feel that she should help them in ways that went beyond the scope of hypnotherapy.
I also want to go back to work, but I am only an assistant. By the time we pay a babysitter, we don’t know if it makes any sense. I have the idea that my mother could do it. She could move to the city, watch the baby. In my mind, this is something she ought to do, should want to do, should be asking to do. But she hasn’t asked.
A couple blocks from my apartment, we are brought to a halt. Shouting, brakes screeching, a bicycle tipped over in the street, and a man in sleek spandex clothes standing by, helmet on this head, looking dazed. The driver gets out of the car, a young woman who looks terrified. Her blond hair is sleek and perfect. Her makeup is perfect. She is wearing razor-thin heels and short, wide pants that display her pale, delicate ankles. Her ankles must be freezing. Perhaps she is on her way to an interview? I feel certain that the interview was for the girl’s dream job and that she would have gotten it except that now she will not make the interview. Tears run down her face. “Did I actually hit you?” she says.
“You hit me,” says the man.
We cannot look away. We stay until the police arrive. I bounce to keep the baby asleep. The snow thickens and falls down on our heads and on the scene, obscuring the people and the street and the buildings, obscuring the man on the bicycle and the woman who ran into him, but none of this obscures what my mother and I have seen, by which I mean, the things we have seen in our minds, the more terrible things that could have happened.
—
We take the baby home. While I am feeding her, my mother dresses for dinner. She puts on a camel-colored dress and a big gold necklace. She looks wonderful. I’ve decided her face looks wonderful, too. The baby presses her soft skin into my skin. Very gently, she pets my shoulder with her chubby baby hand. When she’s done, I put her down on a blanket. I give my mother a hug, and her body feels strange to me, so thin, not at all like the mother I know, a woman who might eat half a cheesecake for dinner then go power-walking through her Ohio neighborhood, at any time of night, arms pumping away, a bullet in white tennis shoes, Walkman tuned to her motivational tape of the moment. She’d come back red-faced and full of ideas. The world is awakening, she might say. Get enlightened or get left behind.
My husband is supposed to be meeting us but he calls to say that he’s running late and we should go on ahead. I don’t have anything to wear and I mean that very literally. The only clothes that fit me are yoga pants, so I put on my nicest yoga pants, the ones that look the most like real pants. I tuck the baby into her stroller and by the time we’re out on the street she’s fallen asleep. My mother and I walk to dinner. We are shown to a table close to the door, presumably because we are saddled with a baby and might need to make a fast escape. Every time someone exits or leaves, we are hit with a blast of cold air, which makes this a terrible table for a baby.
We order a bottle of wine, something my mother and I have never done together. I can’t drink much because of the baby but I assume my husband will take most of my share. I am drinking wine with my mother, who looks like a glamour girl, and she is talking to me about men, how much she wants to meet a man. She orders a salad without any dressing. She takes one tiny sip of wine. I eat all the bread in the basket. I can’t stop drinking the wine or asking my mother questions. I am having a wonderful time. “What about the pilot?” I say. “I mean the flight attendant.”
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I don’t think so. He’s always traveling all over the place.”
“There’s no reason why you can’t travel,” I say. “Shouldn’t you travel? You’re so free. There’s no reason for you to stay in Ohio. You’re unencumbered. You could travel all the time.” I am getting excited. I keep drinking wine. “You could do your seminars like that,” I say. “You could just travel and give your seminars wherever you travel. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful life? Maybe you should marry the pilot.”
My mother puts down her fork. She is taking a break though she hasn’t eaten anything. “Mark hasn’t called me,” she says. “He said that he would call me but he hasn’t. So I think that we should forget about that.”
“It’s only been a couple of hours,” I say. “Maybe he’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I was hoping that he would meet us for dinner. I was hoping to have a date.”
“Well, I don’t have a date either,” I say. “So I guess we can be each other’s date.” Really, the baby is my date, and I’m worried that my date might be waking up. I watch her like I can hypnotize her with my will to go back to sleep.
“I’m tired,” my mother says.
“Move here!” I say. “There are men everywhere! You’ll get a place near me. You can help with the baby.” As soon as I say this out loud, I realize how badly I want it. “Wouldn’t you like to spend time with the baby? You can help me, I can help you.” I knock over my glass of wine, I am so overwhelmed with the perfection of this idea. As I mop up the mess, I think how this is what I need. This is what she needs. For the first time in many years, my mother and I will fulfill each other’s needs.
My mother shakes her head. “I can’t move here. I don’t like it here. All the people. That accident. I’d be afraid to cross the street.”
“I thought you loved it here,” I say.
“I want to work on my business. I want to work on myself. There are so many years—I really don’t know what I was doing. I need to make up for lost time.”
“The baby’s here,” I say. We both look at the baby, who is starting to stir in her stroller. Her face wrinkles and un-wrinkles. I turn to my mother and I can see that she is unmoved.
Before I can reach her, the baby escalates to a full-on scream. As quick as I can, I lift her out of the stroller, but the crying doesn’t stop. Everyone is looking at us. I bounce and bounce. I look for a nook. The bathroom is tiny. There’s nowhere to go. The screaming gets louder. I am starting to panic. The waiter is approaching. I was silly to bring a baby to this place. In a second, I will get kicked out.
“I’m going outside,” I say to my mother, zipping myself and the baby into my jacket, pulling our hats onto our heads. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”
Outside, the snow is falling. It lands gently on our heads while the baby screams. “Don’t cry, baby,” I say. “Don’t cry.” I feel a little woozy, my cheeks flushed and warm from the wine. Despite the crying, I am glad to be outside, where the air is bracing and fresh, where the baby can scream to her heart’s content without disturbing anyone—anyone other than me. This is where we belong.
We walk to the end of the block and come back. The baby is starting to quiet but I can’t quite bring her inside. Through the window, I watch my mother, who is eating her salad, one leaf at a time. She does not touch the bread. She looks lonely to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she wants to be lonely. Maybe being lonely is better than the alternatives.
After a couple minutes, my husband shows up with a camel scarf around his neck and ear clips on his ears, huffing from the cold. He is finally here. He is my most familiar person, but I feel like I haven’t seen him in weeks.
“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing out here?” He puts an arm around my shoulder, kisses the top of my head. The baby lets out a sigh and relaxes her body into my body. I relax my body into his body. The snow falls and falls on all of our heads.
“Go in there,” I say. “I’ll be in in a minute. Just sit with her at table, okay?”
“Okay,” says my husband. He opens the door. Warm air rushes out. Cold air rushes in. He greets my mother. He gives her a hug. He takes off his coat and sits in the chair across from her, the chair where I was sitting before. The snow is melting in his dark hair. I can make out the faint sheen of wet. He talks to her, she shows him something in her notebook, and I feel calm, the baby’s body against my body makes me calm, but underneath I am bereft. She starts to smile. He takes a sip of my wine. She takes a bite of her salad.
Identity and Empathy in America and Assam
His Father’s Disease by Aruni Kashyap
Context / Westland Books, 2019
Hardcover. 184 pages.
In His Father’s Disease, Aruni Kashyap asserts himself as a master of the skill of empathy-building. This is no fluke. It is common to read the debut story collection of an author and feel that there is a lot of technical prowess—say of dialogue, or of voice, or of structure—but little sense that the characters are in fact alive, or come from a lived space. Kashyap, however, who is from the Northeast Indian state of Assam, has already established himself as one of India’s rising literary voices. He has published novels in both English (The House of a Thousand Stories, Viking, 2013) and his native Assamese (Noikhon Etia Duroit, Panchajanya, 2019) and edited an anthology of stories centered on the experience of insurgency in Assam (How To Tell the Story of an Insurgency, HarperCollins, 2020). It is no surprise, then, that in each of the ten stories in this collection, one reaches the end feeling completely immersed in the world Kashyap has created.
The stories in His Father’s Disease can be roughly divided into two settings: either a remote part of the Indian Northeast or a provincial American suburb that a Northeastern Indian has made their home. Kashyap addresses this dichotomy directly in “Skylark Girl,” a metafictional narrative of a Northeast Indian author being paneled at a festival in Delhi, interval-led with a folk story about a woman who is killed out of pettiness, only to come back to haunt the village as a ghost. During the panel’s Q&A session, a woman asks the narrator, Sanjib, “why [he] had . . . decided to write about this magical world, instead of the insurgencies, the violence, and the more immediate topical stories. [Sanjib finds himself] surprised by the question because . . . back home, his Assamese readers did not expect him to write about this or that topic. He was free to write anything.” Much like Sanjib, Kashyap’s stories are foregrounded by a Northeastern perspective, not because he wants to limit himself, but because he feels the freedom to write whatever he wants. Perhaps he chooses to write about Northeast India because this part of India is rarely portrayed in international literature.
Again, this is by no means a limitation. In fact, part of what makes Kashyap’s stories work so well is that they mine locations the author knows so well. The most successful story in this regard is “Bizi Colony,” which details the haphazard and troubling life of a youngster named Bablu, told from the perspective of his brother, who explains how Bablu’s glue addiction and penchant for violence affects everyone in their family:
“Long before my younger brother Bablu began telling our neighbours that Ma sucked Papa’s best friend Hriday Uncle’s dick while Papa was away on official tours to New Delhi, he would touch the breasts of our forty-year-old maid and ask her how it felt. When the timid Geeta-baideo wept, saying that she was the one who brought him up, washed his ass after he crapped as a baby, he beat her up with a cane.”
Bablu is a heinous example of a twelve-year-old, with all of the makings of a sociopath. He causes his mother to cry at odd times and take out her anguish at her husband, just as he causes his father to reflect after traipsing around the house, “‘Am I a failed father?’” The story is a melodrama; what saves it from the common pitfalls of that form is the sense that while Bablu sells drugs and associates with prostitutes, tarnishing the family name with no self-awareness, his behavior is fully his own. Glue addiction is a common problem in South and Southeast Asia, and there are children who seem almost born to be malicious in all parts of the world. No matter how heinous Bablu’s decisions appear, they are rooted in realism.
Kashyap also foregrounds “Bizi Colony” not as Bablu’s story, but as a story about the effect of Bablu’s behavior on his family. When “Bablu [breaks a] tall, thick juice glass on [Ma’s] head because she’d refused to give him money to buy Dendrite or Eraz-ex,” we don’t see it from Bablu’s perspective, but from the narrator’s, who doesn’t cry but “[feels] a strange burning sensation in [his] chest, and a strange, choking lump in [his] throat.” This distance allows readers to observe Bablu’s actions while still benefiting from the emotions and proximity of the first-person peripheral narrator, as if Bablu’s behavior is very much happening in front of us.
“The Love Lives of People Who Look Like Kal Penn” is another story that benefits from Kashyap’s command of point of view. The third-person narrative tells the story of a writer heading to an international conference in Michigan. He bonds with a woman on the plane, in a way that suggests a possible sexual attraction, until she says, “‘You know, you remind me so much of Kal Penn . . . you look like him, quite a lot, do you know?’”
I am a person of Indian origin, so I too receive this comment often. The actor Kal Penn is one of the very few people of Indian heritage who is prominent in American media, so people are quick to say that anyone who is South Asian looks like him. Therefore, I relate more than the average person when the narrator Arunabh is offended and frustrated by the comparison. The manner in which Kashyap arranges Arunabh’s reaction in language is what summons empathy for readers of any background. In the taxi after this encounter, Arunabh “[studies] his reflection in the rearview mirror, and more than once had considered asking Jim whether he saw any resemblance to Kal Penn. And he will always remember the fall colours, his first fall in America: the gold, the yellow, the orange, the red; the blue sky that was slowly turning grey; and his yearning for snow.”
By melding the reaction to a very particular moment, and the feelings evoked by the natural world framing the scene, Kashyap creates multiple spaces for a reader to react to or reflect on Arunabh’s experience. If they cannot relate to Arunabh’s gripes, seeing fall in a new country for the first time may resonate, and if not that, provide a sense of nostalgia through the colors, sensations, and feelings of fall in the USA.
Kashyap also employs this multi-pronged narrative approach to empathy-building in the titular “His Father’s Disease.” The story details the frustrations of widowed Neerumoni as she discovers that her son Anil is homosexual, much like her own husband. She repeatedly walks in on her son with men and finds herself bereaved. The village also reacts hostilely to her son’s sexuality. At one tragic point in the story, soldiers shoot Anil’s lover. The idea of the scene is harrowing enough, but what grounds it as a piece of literature is how Kashyap describes the aftermath: “The blood looked like a red rose blooming on the white bedsheet, and the room smelled like coconut water.”
In choosing such evocative language, Kashyap renders the moment not merely as a violent one, but one grounded in nature. The scents and colors give the reader a critical distance from an extremely emotional moment. The reader is allowed to come back into the scene with their own feelings attached to it rather than only those evoked by the violence.
The power of fiction is to make the reader feel as if these imagined characters are very much living real lives, and more, to feel connected to them even if they reside in completely different worlds. Kashyap understands that to write is not simply to get lost in the individual sentences, but to create characters that resonate. Anyone who reads fiction to explore emotional spaces, both interior and exterior, should absolutely seek out His Father’s Disease. They will find themselves not only intrigued, not only inspired, but utterly absorbed into the world of Aruni Kashyap’s imagination.
The Pageant
“Spain cannot be blamed for the crassness of the discoverers.”
—William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
A man I love says, Why do you worry about where you come from? You’re here. Is that not enough?
—
Bananas ripen to a bloom like a black cloud.
—
Mestizo comes from the Latin mixticus. A mix a mix a mix. Say mixticus six times while looking in the mirror. If you have at least one foot in the Americas, you will conjure up un conquistador noble y su indio salvaje y inocente. White hand clasping brown hand.
—
The 16th century indigenous chieftain, Lempira, is today renowned for leading the (unsuccessful) rebellion against the conquistadors in Honduras.
—
In the language of the Lencas, Lempira means “Lord of the cows” or “Lord of the grass.”
—
In the 1980s, two Honduran lempiras were worth the equivalent of one US dollar; today the exchange rate is twenty-four HNL for one dollar.
—
Lempiras folded into tiny squares nestled in my tiny hand for a trip to the corner store. In the suburbs, the loamy smell creates a palimpsest.
—
Honduras is not a plantation. To be a plantation, one requires a crop, workers, and overseers. But if the workers were Black in a country that had no Blacks, if that thought rendered the worker invisible, well then, who were these people before our very eyes, ingloriously sweating their singing?
—
Alfonso Guillen Zelaya, my second cousin three times removed, is, according to Wikipedia, “the greatest Honduran poet and intellectual in history.” He was also a journalist, my family said, contra el imperialismo. I was told he was exiled to Mexico in 1933 by the tyrant Tiburcio Carias Andino. But the history books say Zelaya, with his American-born wife, left of his own accord.
—
Until 1931, the Honduran currency was the peso. At least twenty-two countries, past and present, have used the peso as currency. Peso, in Spanish, means “weight.”
—
During a several-months-long rebellion in 1537, in which Lempira led 30,000 men, he was lured out by the Spanish who were offering to negotiate a ceasefire. History says that Lempira was ambushed and shot by the Spanish, and it is this sequence—a request for peace, an ambush, and a murder—that the school children of Honduras act out year after year on July 20th, Lempira Day.
—
My dad—who reminded me of Harry Belafonte, of Sydney Poitier—fed his melancholic nostalgia during my childhood, wallpapering our atmosphere with Motown. He told me this after heart surgery. They picked me, he said laughing. One year, I was the Spaniard. The one who shot Lempira through the heart.
—
Memories stick like breadcrumbs in my throat.
—
Zelaya’s poetry in Spanish is melodic but also didactic and pastoral. Zelaya’s poetry idealizes nature as a way of simplifying and cleansing a land and its people of complexity. The poems say, Honduras is not a plantation. The poems watch the land buckle under the weight of her masters.
In a poem translated by William Carlos Williams, the voice says:
Lord, I ask a garden in a quiet spot
Where there may be a brook with a good flow
A humble little house covered with bell-flowers
And a wife and a son who shall resemble Thee.
What does God look like?
—
My hair was straight once, inky blue-black strands, each a representation of logic and perfection. I looked more like Lempira then.
—
It is said that el indio Lempira died in an ambush. And it is this ambush and subsequent death that the children of Honduras have acted out every year in hundreds of schools across the country since the 1930s. One eyewitness account, written in 1558 by Rodrigo Ruiz, a Spanish national in service to the Crown, states that Lempira died in battle. This account was discovered in the 1980s, and yet the pageant continues. Lempira is tricked into this death. Lempira the guileless martyr, símbolo heroico de la patria.
—
You have a beautiful nose, my father would tell me, with thumb and index finger lightly rubbing then pinching his nostrils. It’s so narrow. I don’t understand what it is to love or not to love a nose.
—
In 1926, as the government debates naming the currency after Lempira, a leaflet is distributed among workers calling for the sons of the invincible Lempira to defend the “land of Columbus” against Yankees and Blacks.
The poet Zelaya and other Honduran intellectuals support the measure to raise Lempira’s symbolic profile. Prior to the mid-1920s, no image of Lempira existed.
—
The man hovers over the uncomprehending girl-child, lamenting his own features, like monstrous stamps—his nose, the unconscious touch of the lips to measure their fullness. “My woolly hair, my woolly hair.”
—
Someone said the word miscegenation today.
—
The last time I visited Lempira’s entry in Wikipedia, like an afterthought, in the description of circumstances behind his death, a line I’d never seen before: “The Spanish then ate his corpse in disrespect.” What a fitting symbol of el mestizaje in Honduras. Europe, like Saturn, devouring us like little children.
—
My baby doll diapered. Brown eyes that click shut when you lay her down. Hair so soft, so effortlessly curly. A dark cloud unseen in the sky.
—
No matter how many bananas were harvested, more were needed. Bunch after bunch into the cold bellies of ships ready to set sail for far-off places. The hunger was endless. The ships filled the small port of La Ceiba. The ships would leave, empty the port, only to be replaced by newer, larger, and emptier vessels. All this rotation, under the hum of workers, from sea to field, year after year.
—
Until one day, just like that, the replacement ships began to dwindle and then just stopped coming. The harvested bananas had nowhere to go. The field workers filled the wheelbarrows until there were no more barrows to fill. The fruit hung heavy, not just in the trees, but in the air.
—
There is such a thing as too much sweet.