Tag: Aquifer: The Florida Review Online

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.

 

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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.

 

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Don’t Muddy the Waters, Do Rock the Boat

Everything That Rises by Joseph Stroud

Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Paperback. 159 pages. $14.00

 

Everything That Rises

 

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.

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The Future is Trashion

Erasure based on “The Future is Trashion” by Vanessa Friedman. New York Times. December 26, 2019.

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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.

 

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A Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World

Wild Persistence by Patricia Hooper

University of Tampa Press, 2019

Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00

 

Wild Persistence

 

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.

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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An Array of Possibilities

A Brief History of Fruit by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

University of Akron Press, 2020 

 

A Brief History of Fruit

 

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.”

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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).

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Through a Landscape of Carbon

Artist Statement

 

Storms Will Come #4 is the fourth in a series of twelve small print/paintings on Formica, created between August and Election Day 2020. A lighthouse holds the promise of guidance and stability in a turbulent world; it is built to withstand assaults. While I was working on this image, with the lighthouse itself in peril, ashes from the California wildfires were falling on my studio skylight. Images of flames and floods came to dominate the series.

 

Pitch XVII was born from envy. Always true to itself, regardless of the circumstances, the tuning fork became transported into a visual world of smoke, ruin, and desolation. Rather than tranquility and selfsame identity, the Pitch series explores turmoil, the billowing of emotion, a scientific instrument at a loss in a broken world. Pitch XVII is a monoprint, part of a larger series.

 

Soot and Soul. After the Storm #3: The work of a printmaker moves between the extremes of soot and soul, between the stain of ink and transcendence. The journey is through a landscape of carbon and soot, with the triumphant soul captured in the grime of ink. This work is part of a larger cycle, executed on panels of Formica, combining printmaking techniques and painting.

 

Lying Awake. First Night evokes the territory of the imagination, when thought is submerged and rendered helpless. When one is surrounded by darkness and silence, the outside world peels away, and vision originates from within. Logic and reason become scaffolding. It is soothing to draw on solid stone when capturing such a nebulous realm. This stone lithograph is the first of a series of seven. There is text included of one of my poems in the background of that print, just as a whisper. The full text is included here for reference:

 

Harvest Me

 

When I’m dead or dying,
harvest me.

Like a peasant

that picks the tubers

from a dry patch of land.

 

Plunder me and give me to the poor.

To the drunks and the addicts

the liver, the kidneys.

Peel back the skin and

gather the tissues.

Scoop out my heart

and collect all my bones.

The lame will be walking

the blind will see.

 

But don’t touch my soul.

Promise you won’t touch my soul.

I want it set free,

released from its tethers.

 

By the time that

I am dead or dying

my soul will be ready for flight.

 

Storms Will Come #11 uses graphite for the candles above water, a most tender medium, and scraping for the submerged part. For the sky and the flood below, I applied tusche, a fatty liquid designed for use on lithographic stone. On Formica, it revolts, separates and fractures, capturing the fragility of life, our disparate fates.

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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.

 

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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.

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Relationships

 

My work is contemporary and figurative. Through image-making, I explore what it means to be a human being and to be part of the universal human experience, touching on relationships between people, with nature, and with the environment around us. I see myself and others in a constant cycle, always fracturing, fragmenting, and reassembling ourselves over time. All my work—both art and writing—falls somewhere on this experiential spectrum.

 

When I begin to paint, I imagine myself walking on a beam of light. I work completely intuitively and without reference to anything around me. I look at the blank canvas and simply begin to draw what I “see.” After sketching the image in pencil, I patch in color. I choose acrylic paint because it dries quickly so that I can paint out and paint over, working in a collage-like fashion. I can also use acrylics to create a stained-glass effect by hand-rubbing areas with very, very thin layers of color.

 

I know I am on the right track when I feel the presence of some energy, then come into relationship with the canvas as it begins to communicate itself to me. As I transform the original vision, the final piece emerges. I never begin a painting with an idea. The ideas come later.

 

These 9” by 12” paintings, part of a larger series titled Relationships, are the result of a special challenge I set for myself in 2019. I’d been working on much larger canvases, and I wanted to make smaller, more intimate, almost miniature works. I hoped to prove that a small painting could have as great an impact as a large one.

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The Crypt of Civilization

“It’s the size of a swimming pool,” I said, “and locked in stainless steel. Locked for six thousand years, in fact.” I was telling my son about the Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule in Atlanta. We were in the basement, sorting his toys into piles. An overdue project, because now he used electric razors; he studied for the driving test. I picked up a tiny plastic mare and her tinier plastic foal. I asked, “Do you want them, your Horse and Baby Joe?”

 

He shook his head. “Sounds ambitious,” he said, “that thing in Atlanta.” He was burning through the matchbox cars and the doll that looked like a businessman, the Lincoln Logs and the book in which the bear is forever snoring on. Discard, discard, discard.

 

“These are in there,” I said, holding up a log the size of a finger. “In the Crypt of Civilization.”

 

“Why save a bunch of sticks?” he said.

 

I kept talking. Other items in the crypt: recorded birdsong, aluminum foil, ashtrays, the form of a woman’s breast, a “Negro doll,” a piece of soap in the shape of a bull.

 

“Jesus,” he said, taking a pterosaur from my hands and tossing it with the discards. “Are you kidding me with that list?”

 

I shrugged. “It was 1940,” I said. “Not a great year for time capsules.” I didn’t say: As if there have been so many other, better years. Our hopes and our hubris, the human experiment laid bare, thanks to the Crypt of Civilization.

 

His class did a time capsule once, back when he was in the first grade. A moment in time, or, as the principal said, a moment in conversation. “What will we choose?” she’d asked. We were gathered in the gym on parents’ night, the thick heat of September rolling in through the propped-open door. “Will we choose something that says how far our civilization has come, like light bulbs, or will we choose things from today, from here in 2010?”

 

Later, his dad and I joked. Let’s put in some guns. A bottle of DEET. A white guy billionaire, maybe Jeff Bezos. But our coal hearts burned away when our son chose to add his stuffed lion. Other kids picked the yearbook, mechanical pencils, a photo of Phillip Stanning, the third grader who’d died of leukemia the year before. His parents gave the school their permission.

 

“Why tell me this now?” my son asked when I reminded him. He glanced at the clock, wanting to go upstairs, but I was thinking of stories unearthed. Of conversations between a dreamed-of future and the best and the worst of our past.

 

And what of the forgotten capsules? Conversations never had, conversations still in the earth, magnolia roots pushing against old tin boxes, letters in bulldozed attics, bottles left floating eternally at sea, through storms and under scorching skies. A metal ball orbiting the earth, the silence of that, its secrets tucked in like a heart.

 

“Mom,” he said. “Let’s be done. Let’s give it all away.” It was like this more and more with us. He looked forward, to the car he’d soon drive and the girls he’d soon kiss and to more distant visions—college, roommates, drugs, maybe—while I held his Horse, his Baby Joe and said, let’s build ourselves a capsule.

 

I scooped the discard pile my way. “I’m saving these,” I said, the Legos and the frog blanket and the board book with a dollop of oatmeal on it, long hardened into milky cement. The toys that came later—the stacking robots, the sticker sheets. He knew it would end this way, and I did too. An hour used or wasted, depending on who you asked.

 

“Time,” he said, standing up. “You always talk about time.”

 

As if this was so boring. As if time didn’t start and stop and shift to the left, didn’t corrode and make you whole. Didn’t change little boys who cried as they buried their lions into bigger boys who thought that Lincoln Logs were sticks, discard who they were for who they would become again and again and again.

 

And what of Phillip Stanning’s parents? Sometimes I wondered, across the hurried years, as the elementary school collected artifacts from one class and then another, moved from one principal to the next. As the Crypt of Civilization sat in its deluded wait. What did time become for them that April afternoon when they put their boy into the ground, when they tucked away that last thing with him, that final conversation, that favorite plushy bird?

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There They Are

my mother, my father. Her skinny
blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette.     In the beginning,
it is already too late,    but there is hunger & no time
to waste.    All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork
yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh.    In the beginning,
my cry breaks my father, who flushes red at my fall, opens my face in search
of his mother.          Grasses, grasses on a country
road, hawthorn up to their waists,
aflame.     The crying of no mothers.  Temple bells hung
by the wind.    An October without moons,
a feeling I’ve been here before.  Dew on the page.
Windows billowing   wax paper.
Fall’s charred eyelids.     Toes pressing down my own wet
imprint.    Begin the world without a bang.
Water, air,   the Earth split into an egg,
elements halved for light.      No mothers, just two figures on a bicycle
for one.   A sweaty country road. Stoves that won’t start,
boxes of damp matchsticks.     Strain of a blue wrist
untucking cigarettes from his lips
prayer of hands inside the ashes of mothers,
single finger curving to a hush.    Careful,
hold the glass up to one eye, split the nucleus
with the other, explosions muted by winged lungs.
Put down my pen.    Unfold my eyes.  Count backwards
before legs, before longing, until I hit a snag in the web,
open,   to find my palm full of tears.
Once, there were no mothers. Trace the outline,
one, two, build a family from hunger.                   Listen, a cry, mine,
dragging her mother’s last breath up the jagged washboard as he soaps
my throat clean, baptizing his mother’s blackened lungs.
My mouth opens       to wake their beginning & just like that
blesses our downfall.
There, stretch the canvas, spread oil thin-thin
into our crevasses, what’s that in the distance?       No mother,
not the moon,      just six hands bent over a clock face with no opening,
porcelain spoons    raised to another’s lips,    tap – tap we widen
our insides until ink forks our edges.        In the beginning,
an October without night. Windows torn
open with flashlights. Hawthorn dawning a mother’s last breath.
Let me begin   again,

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Tell Your Mother

I grew up in a flash by your mother’s side.

 

Tell her I loved her deeply, like bells sounding in the distance, like the secret I had to rush to tell her. I loved your mother at the Lutheran summer camp where we got real with our Bibles, where we rehearsed on the Palace Theater stage in the wings while we murmured our parts and pantomimed our choreography before the curtain parted. As best friends, we made space for anything to happen to us, as long as it happened to us side by side, or was documented through letters that we posted in the mail that arrived steadily like ants creating a trail.

 

Tell your mother to tell you how we cut images of what you must be going to look like from magazine pages in the 1990s, how we clipped around your round face and big eyes from baby-food advertisements, certain it was  going to be you.

 

The first I saw of you was a roiling under her skin, kicking while she filmed her belly, feet stretched far before her.

 

Tell your mother to tell you the time, in the charged balm of adolescence, when we lay in a hammock on the fourth of July, watched neighbors tilt back in lawn chairs and for some reason, while we rocked  in the weave of the hammock, while sparklers crackled, and dry as a bone but intoxicated surely by the elation at simply being alive side by side, we laughed so hard at something that rocked us nearly over and to the ground, we peed our pants and tumbled down while fireworks shot up as the floodlight clicked on as the adults chatted, and I consider that place in the grass on the Clintonville lawn that exists with our imprint on it still, the sound of the dresser drawer opening for her to replace my clothes in the room she shared with her sister. We stayed up as late as the night would have us then paraded into the morning hours, just as we paraded from the hammock, our lack of shame like capes behind us.

 

Ask your mother if she remembers learning how to solve the problem of a house fire. The firemen brought a trailer filled with theatrical smoke to the library parking lot where we filed before the door like books to be shelved. There is a way out, we learned, if you crawl under the smoke, if you test the metal doorknob with the back of your hand. We crawled through the hallway, snickering always, toward the trailer exit where, successful, we’d hop out into the clear air having passed the test, and it was this way that we jumped from our tenth birthdays to our twelfth, and now years later we are here, the fire behind us, and you due in her arms in a matter of weeks.

 

When you arrive, she will feel your warm cheek with the back of her hand. Tell your mother that when you arrive, I will step back as she lights the firework fuse of your little life, that I will do my best to be a bellows to your flames.

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A Refusal of Despair

Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano

Etruscan Press, 2019

Paperback. 122 pages. $16.00

 

Cover of Ill Angels by Dante Di Stefano.

 

Although published more than a year ago, Ill Angels, with its indomitable refusal of despair, may be one of those books we need to read in the year of escalating climate crises, social, political and cultural warfare, and the resurgence of and the promise of more biological pandemics. Ill Angels does not wince in the face of the terrible cruelties that haunt the world, but it also does not cede ground in its insistence on hope.

 

On the one hand, Dante Di Stefano’s second book of poetry is a neoromantic paean to possibility, to faith in a future embodied in children and teenagers (especially his students). On the other hand, a countervailing, or perhaps complementary, tendency in Ill Angels finds Di Stefano celebrating the present and presence, represented as much by the distant indifference of inanimate objects (“Jubilate Pluto”) as the proximate insouciance of wild animals (“The Porcupine Climbing the Apple Tree”). Because Di Stefano is all too aware of the cruelty that lies beyond his classrooms—see, for example, “Verruckt,” “45th,” and “O Trampling Empire”—he insists on a love that is the equivalent of ungrounded theological faith.

 

This means that at times Di Stefano echoes the passionate declamations of a Ross Gay, a Cyrus Cassells or an even earlier John Clare. But unlike Gay, Cassells and Clare, Di Stefano’s aestheticized fervor is more metaphysical than quotidian, his tender poems to his wife and his children notwithstanding. This unadulterated sincerity has its risks: many of these poems approach a too-sweet sentimentality, and a few, unfortunately, broach the border, weaving back and forth between good taste and self-indulgent rapture.

 

Fortunately, the balance of this book finds Di Stefano celebrating his good-faith fantasies— “I know all prayer is merely the patter / of little feet coming down the stairwell / in a daydream of a future household”—with well-crafted, often playful, metaphors and similes, bolstered by over-the-top alliteration and assonance that wink at pop culture icons like Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton, to say nothing of literary warhorses like Swift, Pope, and Hopkins. Still, Di Stefano’s unrestrained gaiety in the age of what he aptly names “Stump Speech” demands a robust defense, and while a poem like “And Why This Ridiculous Happiness?” takes a giant step in that direction—there’s no gainsaying the stunning transcendence of lines like “If you speak to eighth graders as angels / and to angels as eighth graders, already / you have become fluent in paradise”—I can’t help but wonder at this excessive faith in language, in poetry, that sidesteps—not overrides—doubt. For that faith seems to depend on delayed endorsement, on retroactive belief: one hopes for love and happiness, and when it happens one believes it appears, in hindsight, as predestined.

 

Di Stefano implicitly acknowledges this slippage between faith and imagination, which is why he also knows that joy can only be truly joy if it is utopian, literally nowhere, unchained from time and space. At the same time other slippages—between past and future, between presence and absence—enable a kind of manic happiness, a man inebriated on both the past and future. Di Stefano and his beloved wander among his “memories of imagined futures,” adrift between innocence and suspended disbelief: “for now we listen / and nothing can curb the sound of this band / as it plays ‘I Ate Up the Apple Tree.’” And if such a postlapsarian moment could last, the two would always be nearing “the Mardi Gras of / an Eden we’ll be forever leaving.” The traditional secular realm of this nowhere is, of course, art. Thus, we are to “imagine the string, / attached to a red balloon painted / in oil on muslin, a gentle tether / that holds us nowhere amidst the cosmos.”

 

To be fair, Di Stefano is not always this overweening and serious. Several poems find the poet in a comic, jocular mood, however much these light flourishes veil darker political and cultural realities. These modest reprimands are best captured in punchy lines like “I think I dated the national debt / on a dare for a week in middle school; / I didn’t like the way she chewed bubble gum.” Ill Angels is peppered with these kinds of tongue-in-cheek delights, and for this reader, sweet tooth aside, they leaven the saccharine confections. As a whole, Ill Angels suggests that Di Stefano is, in the end, an Omni-American, to use Albert Murray’s phrase, a true believer in the country’s destiny which, for Murray (as well as fellow travelers like Ralph Ellison and the recently deceased Stanley Crouch), redeems its past. One implication of this story of redemption is that racial, class, and gender differences evince democratic diversity more so than they do intractable hierarchies. For example, Di Stefano’s odes to jazz greats like Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins focus less on their aesthetic achievements than their populist implications. In practice, then, the Constitution is an open-ended document: “Anyone who opens her mouth to sing / erases and rewrites the preamble.” For Di Stefano, this is hope, and hope is only love in action (to paraphrase everybody from M.L.K to Cornel West). Ill Angels thus unites religious, political, cultural, and domestic faith under one flag—hope—and, like Jesse Jackson, who once proclaimed the same during his 1988 presidential run, Di Stefano wants to keep hope alive.

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Dispersion Series

 

This digital painting series, “Dispersion,” focuses on the influence of shape on both boundary and color. In all my works I have a “central shape”—an abstract form more or less centered in the composition. I always leave it to the viewer to determine how these shapes read; I don’t dictate meaning. In “Dispersion,” these central shapes are either transparent or teeter on transparency, which infuses them with the surrounding color. This surrounding color extends to the edges. The viewer is therefore invited to participate in a two-part experience; they’re simultaneously introduced to the central shape and the surrounding color, and through that pairing, “disperse” themselves—perceptually, spiritually, intellectually—out to the edges of the image (and maybe beyond them, into infinity). Whether that happens or whether everything stops abruptly depends on the viewer’s initial response to the central shape. In 2001: A Space Odyssey there’s a monolith that emits an ear-piercing tone. These pictures should suggest something similar. Whether they are considered infinite or finite, and despite their four edges and the very specific character of their colors, the viewer should be able to hear them in the mind in a private, interpretive spiritual harmony that Kandinsky called “audible to the soul.”

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Some Mornings

Some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

they are full of tiny battles, body pains, and aches

coffee grounds spilled in the crack of tile

egg shells crushed against your spine

 

Some mornings are not meant to be hopeful

the sun’s tyrant gaze slips in through the gaps

the ceiling fan is a switchblade to the ear

alley cats scream their war cries to the world

 

Some mornings are not meant to be calm

the throbbing skull of a night, water-deprived

echoes inside itself, a reminder that the body

desires equilibrium and safety in this storm

 

No, some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

yet the day moves on, mixing with the night

the truce made since the dawn of time

where worries unwind, where thought dissolves,

 

where the world is reminded that dreams live

beyond the body and the body is a dream.

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Evil Comes in Many Ways

Listen, don’t ever talk to strangers. If a stranger approaches you, run the other way and scream at the top of your lungs. Dios, I couldn’t live with myself if you were ever kidnapped. Sorry, Manuelito, no trick-or-treating this year. But Mom, we’ll have adults chaperoning and… I don’t care who’s doing what. You shouldn’t be outside at night, in the dark where it’s easier to kidnap someone. Look at poor Jimmy Ryce, the authorities still haven’t found him. He was walking home in broad daylight when he was taken. That could have been you. You’re both the same age. Oh, stop rolling your eyes at me. Forget about going to the movies—fasten yourself on the sofa and read those Goosebumps books you like so much. I don’t wanna read, Mom. I wanna go out and play hide-n-seek. You can’t. Armando, you’re his stepfather: tell Manuelito he can’t go to no sleepover. What am I gonna tell him that he doesn’t already know? There’s been talk of attempted kidnappings, the whole county is having a panic attack. Anyway, there’s no reason to go out. Oh, no, Dios. Armando, didn’t you hear? They found Jimmy; he was raped, his body mutilated with a bush hook, the parts buried inside planters, encased in cement. A Cuban balsero did it. I heard about it on La Cubanisima radio program. Do you know what this means, Armando? Yes, I do. Remember I’m a balsero, too. Now they’ll point a finger at us hardworking immigrants. They’ll tell us to go back from where we came. That we’re all rapists and murderers. That we don’t belong here. They’ve done it before. That man has left a scorch mark on us all. This never would have happened in Cuba, communism or no communism. Mom, that’ll never happen to me. But it can happen to you, Manuelito; you can be kidnapped and killed and buried inside planters. Mom, I need to go to school. I can homeschool you. What about my friends? You don’t need friends: they’re a distraction. Armando, tell him his friends are a distraction. Let the boy go out, willya? Ah! You’re no use. Manuelito, stay home and eat all the helado you want. Go on, read your little Goosebumps book—I’m never reading Goosebumps again! Jimmy Ryce never would have died if he was a character in a Goosebumps book. Stop screaming. Now, where is that boy hiding—? Oye, Armando! Where’s my son? I can’t find him. Call the police! He’s been kidnapped. Espera, wait, we don’t know that yet. Maybe he’s with un amigo? He’s dead, buried God knows where. Breathe, mija, breathe. Let’s look for him. Miralo, here he is, hiding under the kitchen cabinet. Manuelito, coño, why are you hiding? Stop crying. All I wanna do is play with my friends. Please, let me go! But there’s evil in every corner. Go out through the front door, and it smacks you like a strong gust of wind. Sit down on the sofa, stay home. You’re safe here, you’ll always be safe with me.

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Recipes That Aren’t Mine

Joe and I make refried beans on a Saturday morning while our four-month-old sits in a bouncer and gums his hands. We follow the recipe I’ve learned by watching my mom for years: heat oil in a deep pan, fold each white corn tortilla into four triangles, and toast them in the oil until they are brown and crisp. Joe always reminds me to flip the tortillas and remove them just when they are crispy, not a second later. I’ve burned dozens of tortillas in our two years of marriage, their pockmarked surfaces forming black bubbles. It’s always because I’m in a hurry, turning the heat up too high, or because I’m trying to get something else done at the same time—fry the rice, chop the cilantro. I return to smoking oil and charred chips. I’ve learned that the secret to this meal of refried beans, as with most Mexican food, is taking your time and giving it your attention.

 

—

 

When my parents were dating, my dad told my mom he had always wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom. They were sharing a meal my mom had made for him after a long day of work.

 

“You better be careful,” Mom said. “Someone might mistake that as a proposal.”

 

Dad, the story goes, blushed. “You never know—it might have been.”

 

Returning the jest, Mom smiled casually. “Well, you never know I might have said yes.”

 

Later that evening, he proposed to her on the San Antonio River Walk. He had no ring, no plan, really. I believe it was the only spur-of-the-moment decision he ever made in his adult life—my father the planner, the deliberator, the one I’m said to take after in my notorious cynicism.

 

I try to imagine what it was that overpowered him that day he proposed to Mom: love that disregarded fear and obstacles, a love effusive and daring, the kind of emotion I’ve rarely seen my practical, serious father express in words. A midwestern farm boy, he wasn’t raised to express feelings that way. Sometimes, when I think of Dad as a young man falling in love over food, I think also of the little boy finding comfort—love, safety, and home—in his mother’s cooking. I imagine meals were often my stoic grandmother’s only means of showing tenderness to her children. To say he wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom was to say he wanted a woman to share a home with.

 

On a Sunday morning, when I was having brunch at my parents’ house, Dad told me that beans and hot sauce have replaced mashed potatoes and gravy in his diet. I laughed, because I know how much Dad loves mashed potatoes and how much Mom hates them. She didn’t grow up with them and finds their texture unappetizing. I think of how Dad—born in Chicago, raised on a farm in Iowa—never ate a breakfast taco until he met Mom, born in Guadalajara and raised in San Antonio. Now he eats chorizo, eggs, beans, and jalapenos every morning for breakfast.

 

—

 

After I remove the tortilla chips, we let the oil cool a few minutes. I learned the need for this the hard way, too, from the time I poured an entire can of beans into the bubbling oil and ended up with a sprinkle of burns across my arm. When I told Mom, she scolded me in that strange way we get mad at people we love for hurting themselves.

 

“You have to wait,” she told me, a step I hadn’t remembered ever seeing her take. I simply assumed she’d learned the art of pouring beans into scalding oil without burning herself.

 

I’ve since made it Joe’s job to pour the beans into the pan, regardless of how cooled the oil is. This morning, we use a fifty-three-ounce can of Bush’s Pinto Beans, with their liquid. Joe and I joke that we have a problem, making too much for only two people.

 

“It was the smallest can I could find,” I say, but Joe is happy we’ll have leftovers for tacos later in the week.

 

—

 

Mom has used Bush’s for as long as I can remember, though she talks of a time she used to wash and boil her own beans.

 

“It takes too long,” she says now, “and Bush’s taste just as good.” On the rare occasions she makes frijoles borrachos, I’ve seen just how long it takes to prepare beans from scratch. She lays them out on a towel, their speckly, wiggly forms smooth as she runs her fingers over each one, feeling for bumps and sprouts. She throws out the misshapen ones, rearranges the remaining ones. Then she lets the beans soak in a cold-water bath overnight before boiling them until they’re soft, like butter, then adds tomatoes, cilantro, bacon, and a bottle of Corona beer to the broth. I asked her once if the bumpy beans are bad to eat.

 

“No,” she said. “I just want the pretty ones.”

 

She told me once that her dad, my Tito, used to carry out this bean ritual weekly, often recruiting her from backyard play or homework to help. She says there was always a pot of beans on the stove in her childhood home. Her family ate beans and rice almost every day.

 

“We were poor,” Mom says, which is a statement I realize I can’t understand, not the way she does. Beans and rice have never been the main dish at a family dinner I can remember. My grandparents both owned their own businesses, trades brought over from Mexico. My Tito was, and is, a shoe repairman; my Tita, a seamstress and a sculptor. But with five children, a language barrier, and dying trades, there were times when their hard work barely paid the bills. If they came to this country with the usual hopes of immigrants, their grandchildren even more than their children are the ones who have seen those hopes to fruition.

 

I think of the disparity between their lives and mine, of how much of who I am I’ve inherited from them and the world they came from. Some of those things are simple: the shape of my eyes, my ability to roll my “r’s,” my love for their simple, delicious food. Some of those things are more complex, specific to Mom’s family: a history of brokenness, abuse, and betrayal; a propensity for the dramatic, for storytelling. And yet, though I claim my Latina heritage, I only really know that world through Mom’s stories and recipes.

 

—

 

As Joe fries onions and corn tortillas for migas, another dish I’ve learned from Mom, I wait for the beans to heat back up. I watch as they turn frothy and bubbling, then take a potato masher and smash them into their broth. Once, Joe tried to mash them before they started to boil, and the masher made awkward chunks of the still too-hard beans. We learned that you have to wait until they’re soft, so that when you’re done smashing, the beans look almost like gravy.

 

I heat flour tortillas as I wait for the beans to cook. Joe laughs when I insist that the first tortilla, hot off the pan, go to testing the beans. It’s Mom’s tradition: standing in front of the hot stove, tortillas on a cast iron skillet, she’d rip the edge of one—her fingers moving quickly—and scoop the beans in their broth and hand it to me to taste. If it was too hot in my mouth, we knew they were ready. I do the same for Joe now, and he fits the whole piece of tortilla in his mouth in one bite.

 

“So good,” he says, and I smile, because he never ate refried beans for breakfast until he met me.

 

—

 

Mom tells me that, when I was born, she and Dad couldn’t afford to take pictures of me. With two children and Dad in grad school, film was an expense they couldn’t spare. Meanwhile, I scroll through the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken of my son on my iPhone, every snap as effortless and cheap as a can of beans.

 

I don’t remember those seasons of hardship, the years of hand-me-downs and one family car, when dinner at the Kentucky Fried Chicken counted as my parents’ date night. But I know their toll. I remember, even when we could afford new cars and a custom-built home, the nights when family dinners were disrupted by arguments so bitter they turned the food cold on our plates. Dad’s anger that Mom couldn’t keep to a budget. The stress of a job that kept him away on nights and weekends. The time his anger was so violent that he sent his fist into the drywall, and my brothers and I cried as a pot of Mexican rice sat untouched on the kitchen table. The time I asked Mom why they didn’t think their fighting hurt my brothers and me. If only I knew then how much she already knew that it did.

 

Years later, at my wedding, Dad whispered to me, “I pray Joseph is a better husband to you than I’ve been to your mom.” He was crying, that rare expressiveness surfacing, a vulnerability that told me that he knew, too, that my brothers and I felt the weight of his spousal mistakes, that we would carry them into our own marriages and families.

 

—

 

Joe asks if I want anything else with breakfast, and I add a handful of strawberries to the table of fried, Mexican food.

 

“Are you really going to eat those?” he asks, not because there’s anything wrong with the strawberries, but because I’m notorious for taking out strawberries and not eating them, leaving them to turn crusty and brown in a ceramic bowl all day.

 

“Yes,” I say, which will become a lie. The strawberries are there to make me feel healthy, though I will feel guilty later when I throw them away. Joe, who was not raised to calculate the cost of every item of wasted food, accepts my habit with patience.

 

Some weeks later, when he leaves a pot roast out overnight, forgetting to cover it and put it in the fridge, I’m the one who can’t contain her anger, refusing to speak to him for half the day. Because the roast was expensive, time consuming, the time and the money we don’t have now with a baby. It’s only the sight of him bouncing our son, making him laugh, that reminds me of all the times I wished my parents had weighed their marriage against their anger. A pot roast is pretty light in the scale.

 

—

 

When Mom got breast cancer six years ago, Dad blamed it on food, on the milk from cows treated with hormones, on the grill her parents didn’t scrape clean of charcoal carcinogens. He began to research with all the zeal of the academic he had been before three kids. Diet, he decided, was at the heart of health. He told Mom to buy organic, unprocessed food. He decided to turn the hobby farm he’d had since we were kids into a business, even though raising pigs and cows and chickens is exhausting in any climate, but especially in the heat of Texas summers.

 

Now, he sells farm-raised beef, pastured pork, and free-range eggs in an effort to teach people about sustainable farming and healthy living. But I know the deeper reason, even if he won’t say it, even if his fear for Mom turns into scolding when she doesn’t drink bone broth or cook with the right oils. I know there is love, duty, vigilance, even in his anger.

 

When I was pregnant, he told me I shouldn’t eat corn flakes because they might be tainted with Roundup. I started crying. Hormones aside, my tears were the realization of how deep his fear went. Food has become protection from cancer, from diseases without known cause. Food is how he can protect his family. When he and Mom tell us to read ingredients, to make baby food from scratch, Joe and I complain that they’re being paranoid. We remind them that we can’t afford to buy all organic food. But we also know that food has become their shelter against things beyond their control. We can’t blame them for wanting to build it over us.

 

—

 

Joe and I eat the entire pan of migas and nearly half of the beans; we serve them with a side of Herdez green salsa. I like to remind Joe that I know something about Mexican cuisine, especially when we go to his family’s house for dinners and they serve things like pre-packaged guacamole and cold tortillas. But there is always the part of me that feels like an imposter, like I’m trying to claim something that barely is mine. I use canned beans and store-bought tortillas. If Mom does the same, it’s because she’s trying to save time, and not because she doesn’t know how to make them from scratch. Still, there are dishes she won’t make because she says my Tito makes them better.

 

“Plus, they take way too long,” she says, and I can’t tell if that’s the real reason or the excuse for why I’ve never had her tamales or her menudo. I’ve never made salsa, or chile relleno, or mole from her recipes for the same reasons, and because of the part of me that feels those recipes aren’t mine to make. It is the same feeling that washes over me when I hear someone speaking in Spanish, those sounds and syllables that echoed through my childhood when Mom spoke over the phone to her parents or when she drilled me on conjugation and tense, lessons I can barely recall. I can’t speak Spanish, and yet its cadence feels like home. Like a home I’ve inherited, but I can’t find the key.

 

When people ask me why I can’t speak Spanish, I usually blame my parents: Mom didn’t speak it often enough at home because Dad couldn’t understand it. But if I’m honest, I know that I was the one who stopped practicing, who was too embarrassed by an accent that didn’t flow as smoothly as my mother’s. When it comes to my Mexican heritage, is it only half-known because Mom didn’t share enough with me, or because I am too afraid to enter the discomfort of my unknowing?

 

—

 

After our son was born, Mom drove the five hours to visit us twice over three weeks. She brought meat from Dad’s freezers and filled ours with meals from my childhood. Enchiladas, taco meat, Mexican rice. She spent all day cooking or holding our son while we napped or took short walks, tried to regain a semblance of normalcy in those first, volatile weeks.

 

I don’t remember very much from those sleep-deprived days, except for this feeling that everything was on the verge of breaking. My body. This tiny, hungry person who needed me constantly. Everything about life that Joe and I knew before he came. Everyone talks about the joy of newborns. Few talk about the fear—of failing, of death—that comes with them.

 

But when Mom was there, I felt my fears recede, a sense of reassurance in her cooking and her smile. The sense that the walls of our little apartment would hold up through all the sleepless nights and the strange, repetitive days filled with nothing and everything. Wrestling squirming legs into infant diapers, staring at the rise and fall of his chest as though all our lungs were encased by that tiny rib cage. And even when Mom left and we sat at our table with the reheated food she’d made for us, there was a wholeness created by a family dinner, a comfort in tastes we knew.

 

—

 

As we finish breakfast, our son begins to fuss, so Joe picks him up and sits him on his lap, lets him sit at the table and look at the empty plates and thickening beans.

 

“In a few months, you can try these,” I tell him as I scrape the spoon across the pan, because I know that beans were among my own first tries at solid foods. I wonder to myself if he’ll like them, because I know that both of my brothers aren’t fans of the dish. I wonder if doctors recommend feeding babies beans, or if it’s one of those things my parents did that experts now swear have a hundred health risks, like giving your baby a stuffed animal to sleep with or using baby sunblock. I decide I’ll follow Mom’s example with this one. Our son sticks his tongue out when he smiles, and I notice again that his eyes are Joe’s, but his nose is like mine.

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The Meaning of Home

Homesick: Stories by Nino Cipri

Dzanc Books, 2019

Paperback, 197 pages, $17.00

 

Cover of Homesick: Stories by Nino Cipri.

 

Nino Cipri’s debut story collection is a wonderful exploration of the meaning of home, and what it means when we find it, if we ever do. Throughout each of these stories, characters are asked to relate to a new and changing reality, whether that be finding new life after divorce or rumbling with a mother’s rejection after telling her about being transgender. Cipri, a queer and trans/non-binary writer, explores many LGBTQ+ narratives through wonderful, often magical, speculative stories. Each story ponders on what family and reality look like, especially when others have turned their back on you.

 

The speculative aspects of this collection are done so well that it doesn’t matter how weird the plot might become, the reader is ready to roll with the surreality. In “Let Down, Set Free,” Melissa finds a floating tree on her neighbor’s yard and rides it into her future. In “A Silly Love Story,” Jeremy has a nectarine-loving poltergeist in his closet. In “Presque Vu,” Clay is haunted by keys magically appearing in his throat. These elements, wonderfully executed, allow the narrative to speak on a deeper-than-just-weird level. The reader physically experiences Melissa being uprooted and lifted off to another reality. Jeremy learns about his love-interest only after they bond over the poltergeist. Clay, not knowing what the keys physically unlock, has to wait for the other haunts to find out his future. Each of these characters has a tangible element to help ground the narrative, even if all the trees aren’t similarly rooted.

 

Other stories find their strength in form. In “Which Super Little Dead Girl ™ Are You?” the reader takes a Buzzfeed style quiz to find out which murdered girl they are. Through this imaginative form, the story contemplates what it would be like to be one of these little dead girls—how you’d live on after death, how you’d stay the same age, how you’d be different. In this fun yet harrowing story, Cipri creates a superhero-like adventure for the strong, spunky, and doomed girls who met their end too soon.

 

“Dead Air” is another story with experimentation in form. The entire story is told through a translation of recorded material, which makes the story ninety-nine percent dialogue. Nita, the person with a recorder, crafts an art project by recording interviews with her lovers. Because of the form, we fall in love with Maddie along with Nita, and we feel just as confused when trying to understand Maddie’s past in her small hometown. The mystery that holds people in the town, that eventually kills them, is still hidden from Nita and the reader, but we believe Maddie when she says we have to get out before it’s too late.

 

The heartbreaking “The Shape of My Name” is a hallmark example of this collection’s theme of changing reality. The narrator, a transgender person, wrestles with their mother’s rejection after their coming out. This story, like the others, is speculative in nature. The family has the ability to time travel, though that travel is limited to the years 1905 to 2321. This story effectively bends the view of reality within the narrator. They’ve lived in multiple timelines, gone back in time to see their mother, to come out to her while she was still young. The most heartbreaking moment of the story happens when Heron, as the narrator has chosen to be called, shows up to their mother’s stoop and sees their younger self playing in the background. The mother questions having a son, and they tell her she already has one. She pushes her child away, so the child can’t see their future self, and closes the door on Heron. “The Shape of My Name” gives us a character who has not only lost their mother because of her rejection but has also lost her to time.

 

Whereas “The Shape of My Name” is about a family torn apart, “Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff” focuses on a family mending. This final story of the collection, the pivotal story, follows three ex-colleagues and ex-friends—Damian, Lin, and Ray—as they work on a documentary about their discovery of the ossicarminis, an extinct weasel-wolverine animal that had supposed sentience. This story plays with form by being in all three points of view and by having section breaks that are sound bites from their interviews with the documentary crew. These sections allow each character to have a voice and a perspective throughout this narrative. When you reach the end, there’s never a question about what each character thought or what they felt in the moment.

 

The close proximity of the documentary allows Damian, Lin, and Ray to hash out their past to help rebuild their future. Damian, who wrote a book on the ossicarminis, finds his friends resent him for not including them and taking all of the money for himself. Lin, a PhD candidate, has the bones of the creature in her apartment while writing her dissertation and is caught not protecting them the way she should. Ray questions the dig and wonders about the ethics of not only monetizing the destruction of a type of sentient being, but also removing them from their final resting place. The dig has previously torn apart the group’s work relationship, as well as their friendship, because of their difference in perspective on the same event. This story showcases the blending of personal and professional relationships and how even ones that have been cut off for years can be mended with a little digging. When we see this trio drive off happily into the distance, we hope that the other characters in this collection can someday do the same.

 

Homesick successfully confronts changing (and challenging) realities and gives hope that no matter what today looks like, there’s always hope that tomorrow will be better, and that there’s always a place for you out there—you just have to find it.

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Echolocation & Proof

Echolocation

I begin with near-silence,

the droning refrigerator,

a dog barking far off.

You’ve just fallen asleep

as morning splinters

through the blinds.

He kicks off his boots,

braces himself on the dresser,

pulls at the leg of his jeans.

Something wakes you—

a knocked over jar of change,

a picture frame falling flat.

You must miss the feeling

of waking in the night

knowing exactly where

you are, hearing only

your brothers’ muffled voices

through the wall. Years later,

nights when my friends and I

stay up until dawn,

you’ll wake this way again

to laughter resonating

down the hall. One night,

to meet our girlfriends,

J. T. and I will sneak

to Arroyo Vista Park.

You’ll wedge a drumstick

in the window-track and wait

for our knock at the door.

After sending J. T. home,

you’ll say When it’s quiet, I know

somethin’ aint right. Because

this all feels close enough

to the truth, and because I have

no evidence I was made

the usual way—not even a picture

of you and my father together—

I’ve made this:

In splinters of

morning, you pull me from

his open mouth while he sleeps,

piece me together from handfuls

of his running breath, the small

sound of whitewater.

 

Proof

The fact is I was made

from what Whitman called

“father-stuff,” from a current

of you and from being held.

This—the raw physiology of it—

may explain why most fathers

think only of pushing their sons

into the world and most mothers

only of keeping them from it.

But the facts only tell us

half of every story, and never

the half we need. I have

a photograph taken just weeks

after I was born. I was

sleeping on your bare chest.

You were slouched in an armchair

with your fingers laced like rivulets

under my feet. These are facts—

even if you forgot, and even if all

I remember from being with you

before Arizona is the smell of

shop grease and dipping tobacco,

you once held me the way

a riverbed wants to hold a river.

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Code Blue Theater

You were the one whiteboy who came over to visit a house where usually there were only blackfolk. You were friends with Kevin—my boyfriend—his former co-worker at the nursing home. You extended your hand not to give me dap, or to pull me into a bro hug, or even to change the shape of your hand for a fist bump, but to clasp my palm, as in a transaction.

 

You didn’t say wassup or what it do, but nice to meet you.

 

Your name was Riley, and you were tall with dirty blond hair, blue eyes, a chipped tooth, and some might say you were cute.

 

You drank Natural Light, smoked cigarettes, and weed if it was passed your way.

 

You were addicted to opioids, but you’d been trying to quit, especially after your girlfriend quit you; she was a CNA where you and Kevin worked, but after dating you a while and you wouldn’t let the pills go, she let you go. You left the nursing home not long after that.

 

One day, three years later, when I was home on spring break from graduate school in Iowa City, I watched you overdose.

 

It happened on a Friday afternoon, when you were supposed to be cutting the backyard, even though the sky was gray and steadily darkening with threats of a rainstorm.

 

I had plans to spend the day with Kevin on the couch binge-watching Netflix, but company kept arriving.

 

Benita was the first, announcing herself popping her Double Bubble gum.

 

You came in right after her, pulling a lawnmower behind you like a wagon, holding to the handle with one hand while jostling a can of Natural Light in the other. By the time you made it to the dining room—where Benita and I were sitting—you’d left a trail of beer that foamed on the hardwood floor.

 

You better clean that shit up before Kevin sees it, Benita said.

 

You looked back at the spillage and mouthed fuck.

 

Get the mop dude, she said when you stood there gaping at the mess you’d made. The way she exaggerated the u made it seem as if what she’d really said was: get the mop you dumb, triflin ass, muthafucka. Benita was harsh and, if you didn’t know it already, you got on her nerves. Why didn’t he just take the lawnmower around the side of the house? she said to me after you’d gone into the kitchen. But you didn’t go for a mop, you went for paper towels, which we could hear you tearing off in sheets. The mop, dude, get the mop, she yelled. You wasting paper towels.

 

You were shrug-shouldered with humiliation when you returned with a mop to clean up the mess. Did you wet it? You gotta wet it, Benita said and watched you slink off to the kitchen again.

 

At least you had the floor cleaned by the time Kevin came back inside.

 

You and I would often joke about Kevin’s idea of what constituted clean and orderly—how he liked his place mats arranged on the dining room table with the corners touching so the center of the table was a framed rectangle; how his condiment bottles on the countertop must be in rows by height with labels facing out; how the chairs should be tucked beneath the table when not in use so they weren’t in people’s way when they moved around the room.

 

Kevin didn’t comment on the wet streaks slowly fading away. He’d decided to put some meat on the grill and went into the spare bedroom where he kept a bag of charcoal in the closet and dragged it through the kitchen to take outdoors. I asked him if it might rain, which was my way of saying don’t cook out because it might rain. Kevin answered by asking me to season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts. I did not season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts.

 

Terry was the last to show up, talking on his cell phone. I told Kevin to ask him to season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts. Hearing his name, Terry waved me off then secluded himself in the living room, where blackout curtains created a dark alcove for him to hide in, but not to muffle the conversation he was having with his soon-to-be ex-wife, whom he’d recently begun to refer to as his baby mama.

 

I heard him pop the tab on a tall boy of Bud Ice (the only beer he and Kevin drank) and loudly slurp the spillover. Kevin had told me several times during our nightly, long-distance phone calls how Terry regretted that his marriage was breaking up and he didn’t care anymore that his wife had gotten pregnant with another man’s child. Of course, the fact that he, too, might father a child with another woman may have given him this perspective; he might have rationalized their mutual infidelities as a mutual cancelling out of wrongs: they’d both fucked up so couldn’t they just get past the drama to be parents to the one child they’d created together? He’d be by to pick her up later, I heard him say, and then his voice lowered in pitch, as if he’d cupped a hand around the mouthpiece. Come on, he said, crooning to her like an ’80s balladeer in what he could never deny wasn’t an attempt to please, baby, let me hit that, he said.

 

You’d taken the lawnmower to the backyard and returned to the dining room with another 12 oz. can of Natural Light. You popped the tab and set the can on the table beside Benita. Without taking a sip, you lingered briefly in the middle of the room and mumbled to yourself, or to Benita or to me, neither of us could tell, then took off again. You returned with a leaf blower, a gas can, which you carried beneath one arm, and another Natural Light. You opened it and placed it this time on the mantel and took the leaf blower and gas can to the backyard. Never once did you sip from either beer.

 

Benita looked up from a game she’d been playing on her cell phone to watch you leave the room and come back. Her hair, slicked down with grease, was pulled tight into a ponytail that lashed the air each time she whipped her head to follow you back and forth, a snarl stiffening her upper lip like a pinched fold of dough. Her expressiveness portrayed a three-dimensional annoyance that reminded me of the look on people’s faces after they’d made a petty comment about some petty thing.

 

When she heard Kevin in the kitchen, she went to him to ask what was wrong with you.

 

Kevin told her you were on one, entering the dining room seasoning a plate of boneless chicken breasts. He set the plate on the table to light a Black & Mild, then continued to lightly dust the meat with seasonings.

 

Benita asked what you were on.

 

Through an exhale of smoke, Kevin told her he didn’t know. Probably roxys, he said, two fifteens. He clenched the tip of the plastic filter between his teeth, his right eye cinched tight to avoid the smoke, and let the tip rest in the corner of his mouth.

 

Two fifteens my ass, Benita said.

 

As if on cue, you walked in tilting a can of Natural Light. You’d forgotten the other open, untouched cans still in their places on the table, the mantel. You tried to take a sip but missed your mouth when you stumbled, lifting your foot too high, as if you were prepared to step up and had come down thinking a landing was closer than it was, so gravity pulled you forward, which threw you off balance. You pretended to play it off with a bit of footwork you said you’d learned from watching Childish Gambino.

 

You need to sitdown, dude, Kevin said, laughing.

 

You fucked up, ain’t you? Benita said simultaneously.

 

I’m awright, you said, and as if to prove this you shook your arms and legs vigorously in the air. You seemed agitated. Your eyes were wet and tired, the rim of your lower lids puffy, pink like an albino rabbit’s eyes. Your eyes wanted sleep, but your body was fueled, apparently, by thirty milligrams of pills to keep you sleepless. When you disappeared outside again, Benita told Kevin that she heard that you crushed your pills. Kevin said yes, you did, and that you snorted the powder. Benita shook her head, her mouth pursed. She didn’t snort her pills, nor anything else for that matter. Unlike you, she took pills because she had sickle cell anemia. Yes, sometimes, she’d said many time before, when her sickle cell flared up and she could barely get out of bed, she had to call around to see if she could buy extra pills; she needed always to be in constant supply of pills to keep the symptoms of her sickle cell in check.

 

I gotta get this meat on the grill, Kevin said and grabbed the plate of boneless chicken breasts and headed outside. Terry came in just then and the two of them stopped just short of colliding. My bad, Terry said. He had been in the backyard and came to tell us you just fuckin threw up in the trash can.

 

Puttin shit up your nose. That’s what happens, Benita said.

 

Terry said you were outside sweaty and red in the face.

 

Would you put shit up your nose? Benita asked me.

 

Nah, I said, to imply hell no! as if I’d never dared to do something like that, ever, not ever had I smoked crack cocaine, nor did I once, when so fucked up, attempt to snort through the lit end of a cigarette. Obviously, Benita had forgotten I’d told her about my past drug use, about those very incidences. I searched her face for the recognition that told me she remembered, but her own eyes were glazed over with what could be either the weariness of being fed up with other people’s shit or this was the settling in of her own high. She tapped a cigarette out of her pack and proceeded to strike a series of sparks with her lighter. Your lighter’s out of fluid, Benita, I told her, but she kept trying.

 

Who knows why people do what they do, she said, her head beginning to loll.

 

When I finally went outside, the coals were lit and the grill was smoking. Kevin paced nervously as the skirt of his black bib apron fluttered in the slight breeze, clapping a pair of tongs together like pincers in one hand and taking frequent swigs from his beer with the other. Terry leaned against one of the posts on the small porch, giving me the side-eye when he saw me, shaking his head. It’s not looking too good, he said, nodding toward something past me. I followed his gaze to where you sat in a patio chair a few feet away from the grill. I hadn’t noticed you, but probably because I wasn’t expecting to see you sitting with your legs shoulder-width apart, each of your arms resting along the arms of the chair, your head hanging so your chin barely touched your chest, your mouth languishing partly open with drool stretching a silvery strand down into your lap.

 

Kevin and Terry alternated turns calling your name. Kevin tilted up your head, only for it to fall forward with a slight bob; he said you needed milk. Terry directed our attention to the dog, Kevin’s pit bull, who circled you in your chair then stopped to lie down. She whined, half-barked, then she was up again, letting loose a high-pitched squeal; she pawed at the dirt and grass, digging with her nails and sending a fretwork of dust into the air that formed a cloud around you.

 

Kevin came back without any milk but with Benita smoking her cigarette. Oh gawd, she said, her eyes now wide open when she saw you. She said she had to leave because you were fucked up. You were a whiteboy, she said, and if one of us had to call 911, she didn’t want any part in what happened when they got there.

 

I didn’t pay Benita any attention. I watched you, wondering how many sad clowns were packed inside that tiny car.

 

Kevin, too, paid Benita no mind because he thought you were just passing out, which was good, he said, because you needed to sleep it off.

 

I wasn’t so sure. I went inside.

 

I heard Benita’s thick-heeled boots not soon after, clomping into the dining room where I’d distracted myself on the computer.

 

Benita stuttered directions for me to look up on the internet the signs of an overdose. I did and listed a few symptoms to her: dilated pupils, severe difficulty or shallow breathing, gurgling sounds, blue lips or fingers, nausea or vomiting, unresponsiveness … a person didn’t need to exhibit all the symptoms to indicate an overdose. Benita rushed outside, yelling to Kevin and Terry: vomiting, something about the pupils, gurgling in the throat, breathing with blue lips …

 

It had been roughly thirty minutes since you unloaded your car with all the tools you needed to cut Kevin’s backyard, since you danced your way out of a stumble and Kevin and I laughed, since you popped open three cans of beer, two of which you abandoned untouched, and then you suddenly began vomiting in the garbage can and were placed in that chair. But, if you had done so, how long had it been since you snorted those pills?

 

Benita rushed back through the house gathering her purse and cellphone off the table, and waved goodbye. See ya. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. I’m going to get my nails done.

 

I set the laptop aside, feeling uneasy. I needed to see for myself how bad it had gotten for Benita to leave the way she did.

 

I felt as if I were about to open a door into a past that often haunted me, entering a room to lift a sheet covering a body that lay cold on a slab. Was it me?

 

I became a visitor in a place I hadn’t been to in a while. Even though I recognized those familiar surroundings, I felt like a stranger, and it was possible that you, too, felt like a stranger inside your own body.

 

I’m coming, I’m coming was the reluctant way I walked through the rooms to get outdoors.

 

I heard music that wasn’t playing before as I approached the backyard, smelled mesquite smoke mixed with charred chicken flesh and seasonings that didn’t waft on the subtle breeze before, and, through the window, I saw the opaque clouds billowing from the grill that before was a cloud of dust the dog had kicked up, but this new cloud blocked you from my view.

 

This was the moment I pretended that I didn’t wait too long to follow my intuition; that I didn’t need to suspect a bad situation even when your slack-jawed mouth drooled with so much silvery, silken strands of spit; that you weren’t propped up like a mannequin to model normalcy; that you weren’t trying to convince us that you were only having a bad trip (but nothing you couldn’t shake off); that this was you just playing possum.

 

Kevin used his cell phone to record you while he and Terry kept calling your name. But you couldn’t answer them.

 

Your arms had gone limp, no longer resting on the chair; your hands were likewise motionless between your thighs. You breathed, but your breathing was labored, shallow gasps as if the air inside was trapped so deep inside your chest that when it reached my ears it was the echo of your efforts to breathe that I heard, your lungs taking in breath but sending back the faint noise of rattling cans.

 

You were in tremors as if from shocks of low-voltage electricity, as if your body was a city of dimming lights from a series of rolling brownouts.

 

You were shutting down.

 

Your face was blue with the encroachment of more blue—your lips blue, your cheeks besieged with blue, an armada of blue storming toward the north theater of your face, capillaries carrying the blue until the totality of your face would be subsumed by blue, and Terry and Kevin acted as if they didn’t know whether to continue to barbeque, to wait and see what happened, or to do as I said and fucking call 911.

 

I couldn’t stop looking at you. I wouldn’t blink; if I didn’t blink, you’d be fine; you’d be fine because I was fine; because I was proof that rock bottom didn’t need to mean death.

 

I’d come down off the pipe once and struggled through the night shivering, and no amount of blanketing would qualm, and nothing could distract me from believing that as I lay in a bed demonized by crack cocaine, I felt elsewhere the heels of so many people walking back and forth across the future site of my grave.

 

I had to believe that Terry didn’t want to call 911 because he was a felon who didn’t want cops swarming with their detective work.

 

Kevin was afraid that he might be wrong about you having a bad trip, and that you were dying while he drank beer, recording you while he made sure the boneless chicken breasts were neither overcooked nor raw in the middle. He was afraid, the way we all were, that this wan’t the movies where the blue in your face was special effects makeup and magic.

 

We heard sirens coming from of St. Mary’s Hospital, a few blocks away. Within minutes, three paramedics in a fire truck climbed out and, together, walked casually to the backyard.

 

Back here? one said, pointing.

 

Yes, back here, I said, swinging my arm like a propeller to rush them.

 

The first paramedic knelt beside you, took his fist and rubbed circles over your heart. The second asked us your name. When we told him, he asked you if you could hear him. What’d you take today? he asked. Your response carried the same low gurgling you’d been making since Kevin dialed 911. Shaking his head, the paramedic repeated the question.

 

The third paramedic started an IV and gave your vitals to the second, who wrote them down on his gloved hand. The glove was blue, and I worried the ink wouldn’t show. I came closer when the first paramedic shone his tiny flashlight into your eyes to check your pupils. They were small as pinpoints. The whites of your eyes waxy.

 

Two cops arrived and immediately began gathering details. The first cop took information from one of the paramedics, while the second spoke with Kevin. He told the cop that you admitted taking two fifteens of roxys, but Kevin believed you took more than that, or you took something else with it. The first paramedic stopped rubbing your chest to interrupt their conversation. He agreed with Kevin, so the cop asked if you were ever in the house. First, Kevin said no, then he backtracked, and said instead that you had been unloading the lawnmower from your truck and started to bring it through the house before he stopped you and asked that you bring the lawnmower around the house to the backyard. I worried he was implicating himself too much because he was so desperate for you not to be in the house in his version of events. He didn’t want to give the cops probable cause to search the house.

 

Terry had been quiet, shrinking back, his eyes suspiciously watching the cops. He saw me looking for him and when our eyes locked, he mouthed that’s the cop. It took him a few times mouthing and gesturing at the cop for me to understand what he said, but then I understood. Terry had been in a minor car accident just around the corner from Kevin’s house a few weeks earlier. But Terry didn’t have a driver’s license. The cop wrote him a ticket and that seemed to be the end of it. But seeing him now, at the house, was too much of a coincidence. It incited a nervous fear within Terry that showed on his face.

 

I walked over to tell Terry I didn’t think the cop recognized him. He was too busy explaining to Kevin how people would sometimes ask to use the bathroom so they could take drugs. That’s why he wanted to know if you were in the house. He needed a timeline of events. But everyone’s conversations were put on hold when suddenly you leaned forward so abruptly in your chair you nearly fell out of it. Two of the paramedics had to catch you and press you back into the chair. Easy, easy Riley, they said.

 

You shook your head, looked around to familiarize yourself, and as if none of this ever happened, responding to a barrage of questions, you verified your name, spelled your last name that had earlier given Kevin trouble; you gave your address, and, finally, because you were cold you asked for a blanket.

 

In a minute, a paramedic said.

 

Curiously, though, no one asked you what you’d taken. They loaded you onto a gurney with a blue blanket. You wrapped it around yourself, including your head. Your muffled voice asked what hospital they were taking you to.

 

It’s wherever you want to go, a paramedic said.

 

You said St. Mary’s since it was closest to your house.

 

As they wheeled you away, Kevin closed the lid on the grill to suffocate the still red-hot coals. I took the chair you sat in and stacked it with the others. A smear of blood on the armrest had to be wiped away. Terry wanted to leave but was afraid to get in his car and drive home.  Across the street, where you’d parked your car, the two original police officers were joined by two more squad cars and a K-9 unit. It had grown dark by then. Flashlights lit the interior of your car while a German shepherd was taken by the leash to sniff around and eventually inside your vehicle. They had your car keys, I’d forgotten. After you were taken away, Kevin found them, which must have fallen from your pocket at some point, hidden in the high grass. One of the police officers asked to take them.

 

You came back to the house a few hours later. Kevin and I were playing a game of spades with some friends—the JJs, Jay and Jalisa—who arrived shortly after the cops had put away their flashlights and left. Kevin showed them the video he’d taken of you earlier in the chair. Jalisa had been rolling a blunt and Jay smoking a cigarette, and both of them watched with their mouths agape at the blue, drooling face gurgling ceaselessly before the camera.

 

As they watched the video, I replayed that sudden intake of breath that brought you back to seemingly full vitality. Narcan, I was told, was what the paramedic administered through the IV. They said it took about two minutes to revive you. Two more minutes without it, you might have been dead.

 

You had come back to ask Kevin to let you keep your lawn equipment in his backyard, to tell him privately that you’d taken heroin earlier that day, and to thank him for calling 911. Kevin must have told you I was the one who told him to. You said thank you, Darius, on your way out, avoiding my eyes, though you briefly squeezed my shoulder. Kevin walked you to the door and returned quickly to the table to deal the cards for another hand. We beat the JJs that night, but probably because they’d gotten too high smoking the blunt to pay attention.

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The Voices of Women

The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose by Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade

Noctuary Press, 2019

Paperback, 270 pp., $16.00

 

Cover of The Unrhymables by Julie Marie Wade and Denise Duhamel.

 

The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose brings together the voices of poets Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade whose harmonizing take the reader across a spectrum of topics—marriage, divorce, body image, motherhood, queerness, and womanhood.  Duhamel and Wade’s use of the lyric essay format, propelling the reader by associative leaps and thematic recurrence rather than causal narratives, allows them to zoom in on individual words and concepts in order to peel back their associations layer by layer.  This elasticity of the conversation between the two women pulls the reader into the conversation with them in a unique way.  The authors are writing from different perspectives, Duhamel almost a generation apart in age from Wade, yet their assemblage of experience blends in such a way that it becomes a kind of Everywoman experience. The sisterhood cadence throughout is undeniable and takes us places we might not expect to go.  One can imagine sitting on a sofa, late into the night, listening to an intimate conversation with two women as they compare their lives’ experiences and explore the challenges of womanhood from a generational standpoint—this is the intrinsic quality of The Unrhymables.

 

The book is constructed with thirteen thematically linked essays created by micro-memoirs, some of which are sub-titled, from both Duhamel and Wade, moving the conversation back and forth in a fluid motion within each essay. The most challenging aspect for the reader, but evidence of a discernible synergy between the two authors, is the fact that their voices are indistinguishable at times—only separated by inferences to their sexual orientation, coming of age experiences, and their childhood—which are filled with societal and cultural references that invariably reveal the particular author. In the essay “Pink,” Wade learns about the Nazi downward facing “pink triangle” used to identify homosexual Jews, and Duhamel responds with her experiences in New York City during the AIDS crisis and how the Silence=Death slogan’s logo “turned that pink triangle right-side-up.”  Both authors experience the same kind of emotions, only years apart in different contexts.  This kind of navigational point occurs frequently throughout the prose and directs the conversations.  Should the reader not know some of the more intimate details of the authors’ lives, nor have read other works by Duhamel and Wade, one could conceivably read the text without knowing exactly which one is speaking.

 

However, the hybrid nature of this collection is what takes The Unrhymables to new heights. From writing about colors—“White,” “Pink,” “Red,” “Blue,” “Green,” and “Black”—and exploring their personal, historical, and cultural associations, to constructing a Scrabble edition including tandem essays “N1E1A 1R1”  and  “E1 R1 A1 S1,”  both of which deal with homosexual acceptance in society, Duhamel and Wade take every opportunity to speak through other poets and writers or mention their work.  In fact, the book has no less than 188 references.  In an especially powerful and poignant moment, Wade recites Orlando poet Stephen Mills’s poem “The History of Blood” to weave into the narrative her fears about gay violence, “Another gay boy got bashed in Miami this week, nearly beaten / to death on his way home from a club. The man’s fist / smashed the boy’s glittered face, like my glittered face dancing / at the gay bar every weekend.”

 

The essay “S1A1L1T1” sings with Wade’s inattentional-blindness, referencing the poet Elizabeth Bishop without explanation to the audience. The reference is subtle to an average reader—probably missed by most—but familiar to poetry readers. Wade points out in the opening lines of the essay, “If this were chess, I’d choose the bishop and call her Elizabeth. I’d praise her for her smooth slants, her incomparable zigs and zags—never straightforward, never straight back. ‘Elizabeth is a queen’s name’ someone would say. Only poets would understand.”  She follows this with “For years I read ‘In the Waiting Room’ in waiting rooms.” Then, a paragraph later, she does it again as she talks about ordering an omelet for breakfast while in Colorado and how she is chastised by her order-taker for expecting the waitress to associate a Denver omelet with a Western omelet, “But when the fluffed eggs appeared, folded sideways and smothered with sharp cheese, it was ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’—another Bishop poem.” All of this to explain the “extra-textual juxtaposition” of bringing art and life together in a literal fashion. It’s this sideways slide found in Wade’s work that makes her such a joy to read.

 

Nonfiction prose is a departure from Duhamel’s award-winning poetry, but experimentation within her work is not. She is known for playing with pantoums, villanelles, and forms of her own invention such as “porn poetry.” And it’s not the first time she has paid homage to her women forebearers or engaged with feminism in her work. Readers will not find the whimsical poet of “Rated R” in the pages of this collection, but they will find Duhamel’s candid approach as she brings to life the times in our history when our mothers and grandmothers faced much tougher times in terms of equality, racism, and sexism. On occasion, the poet does emerge and takes the reader on a delicious ride, as in “Kaboom,” the sub-titled essay within “Word Problems,” where she writes about wonky words such as boondoggle and conundrum. She even thanks Edgar Allen Poe for tintinnabulation. Readers will appreciate her simple and subversive delivery as she tackles difficult subjects, bringing wisdom to the page. Her details of the sixties and seventies, where many of her experiences resonate with an older generation of readers, also offer deep insight as her gaze is juxtaposed against Wade’s younger perspective.

 

The final culmination of the dual voices—and the voices even beyond their own two—comes in a glossary at the end of the book akin to Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker’s Fabulas Feminae; Duhamel and Wade’s version includes more than a hundred women and girls from the authors’ personal lives as well as public figures, from past and present, literary figures, and fictional characters. It’s really an homage to the wonderful mixture of women—the scholars, the feminists, the divas, the poets, the victims, the comedians, the fashionistas, the heroines, the goddesses, the icons, the red-heads, the singers, the writers, the sirens, the childhood friends, the movie stars, the classmates, and yes, even the grandmas—who inspired or influenced Duhamel and Wade specifically, but all of us really, in some way.

 

The book feels like a fresh approach to collaboration. While the authors each take turns giving their thoughts on the same subjects, I didn’t find an established order as I read. In other words, I might read two essays written by Duhamel, followed by one of Wade’s. As in a conversation, one person might have more to say than the other, and this is what makes their collaboration so fluid and natural. By placing their voices side by side, they allow the reader to gain insight into what has or hasn’t changed from one generation to the next. More importantly, I believe the prose embodies the voices of all women, past and present, as influencers of Duhamel and Wade.

 

After reading The Unrhymables, I have to ponder the idea of the collaboration as a hybrid in addition to the body of work. It’s that sideways slide again: the idea of the offspring from two varieties, composed of different elements, produced through human manipulation for a specific genetic characteristic. The result is a consonant cluster of sorts—Dwade, I call it—each of their notes produced simultaneously to create a particularly savory tone.

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Two Lynchburg Poems

Riverside Park, Lynchburg

At Riverside Park off Rivermont Avenue,

Katy and I sit on a boulder viewing

the overcast valley where classmates

died leaping

from the 200-foot train trestle.

Every day my body betrays itself into

believing it’s dying, believing the pastor’s

words that homosexual boys

are destined for death.

Katy lights a cigarette as a canopy of leaves protects

us from the rain, says, “I wonder what it feels like to know

you’re going to die.” The train whistles

in the distance.

My mom pretended to die for attention

after she left me. For once I don’t feel her

absence in my body. For once

I feel kind of okay, like I won’t walk

up and down a foggy

Court Street at three a.m. in front of the Episcopal church,

crying and begging

God to make me straight so my father

doesn’t leave me too.

We walk back toward the car in the rain,

listening to the train chug pass in the distance

along the riverbank.

In the clearing between the path and the forest

a gathering of fireflies twinkles in the twilight, my prayers

burning in the trees.

My arms around Katy who, after smoking,

smells like my mom plummeting to earth

on a meteor.

A tear carves down the tracks of skin and leaps off

my jawline. My body simmers to smoke,

little fires,

this figure of ash.

 

[Driving away from Lynchburg]

Driving away from Lynchburg, realizing

the Blue Ridge is my home but not

where I’m meant to live,

a tiger swallowtail smears across

my windshield in powder yellow.

I too have wished to feel the painless

end, but a windshield

nebula requires a life, brittle

as the swallowtail’s chitin wings,

one the mountains can’t afford to lose.

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The Bright Forest

My beloved spoke, and said unto me:

‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’

—from “The Song of Songs,” attributed to King Solomon, circa 950 BCE

 

This planet may host a thousand worlds, or maybe millions: worlds within worlds, each nation a deck of cards, each citizen a new deal. But as certain as Gregory might be that many worlds must exist, he knew that he had claims in only two. He could live in the world which contained Sylvie, or he could live in the world which did not. He had a secret name for the world with Sylvie. He called it the Bright Forest.

 

Sometimes she could draw him into that world merely by speaking his name on the telephone. “Gregory?” she would begin uncertainly, and then pause. The uncertainty itself seemed to undo the normal world. It was like a fairy-call, and in that brief silence Gregory would be drawn, sometimes against his will, into the forest ruled by the misrule of Sylvie: a fairy queen, dark, with the serious expression of a girl, not of a woman. In the forest, she was at times openly a child, but no less the author of the tale. Much later, when he lived in the other world full time, the world without Sylvie, the Big World as he called it, he liked to say that he once knew someone who had thought about growing up but had thought better of it. People would smile when they heard this kind of thing, would joke about Peter Pan, but later, privately, he felt bad. Privately, he said, “What if innocence matters?” And he admitted to himself that when young with Sylvie he had looked up into windy sunlit birch trees and they had both seen the leaves flash in great numbers. And only when together! This was tantamount to a confession of faith by a fallen child, and it tore at him so much that sometimes long later he would pick up his phone and call her, and begin, uncertainly: “Sylvie…” then pause for the fairy-call in return and say, again like a child himself: “Oh Sylvie, today I turned forty-one.”

 

As a boy, Gregory was pale, with pale eyes that you could look straight through without interest. Drive into the suburbs and you might see dozens like him—boys with bikes and the pettiest temptations. He had gone to college as a studious lad without a clue on how to make friends or find a lover. He wrote to his parents: “Dear Mom and Dad: All is well. It looks like I have made peace with my Econ 12 T.A. and have been to the beach three times. I should be able to make your check last until February.” When it rained outside his dormitory, however, he opened his window for the wet smell. And sometimes, like a premonition, he would walk out into a night of crickets and feel a largeness in the sky—but nothing much more than that until he met Sylvie.

 

They met as freshmen in English Lit 221: The Romantics, where they were in the same section, and Sylvie was the only one who really cared about Byron, who she called an elitist pig. He just thought Byron a bore, though there was something to some of that stuff by Keats. She loved Keats and Shelley, too, but hardly bothered to turn in assignments. Sylvie was no “college girl,” but merely “in college” the way an animal wanders into a serious place, an office or a classroom, sniffs, and wanders out again. She told him seriously that professors murdered all poetry. That poets were in fact real people who really cared about what they were writing, and not in the least what stupid college students or professors said about it. That poets had actually seen the magic in the world and tried to communicate it, and that he should try reading their stuff under a tree without looking for the fucking underlying themes. “Seriously, Gregory. Tonight.” And she took him out at ten p.m. with his book and a flashlight and a jar of peanut butter in case they got hungry.

 

Of course they kissed, and her hands roamed, and they fell in love.

 

 

—

 

 

In love! There came a day when he walked into a city park in the full knowledge of being in love—looking at the other people in wonder, as if they must know. Of sharing secret amazements in the eyes of other young people, who must be, like himself, in love. If only he had known that it was all true, all along, all of it. Neither Gregory nor Sylvie were handsome people, but love does not require physical beauty, it only requires an alliance with beauty. So the two of them forgot about literature and sought beauty together everywhere—parks, houses, restaurants, bed.

 

In the face of this alliance with beauty, other things fell away. And so there came another amazing day when Gregory walked down the main street of the college town in full knowledge of Sylvie failing in all her classes. Not just one, but all. This information overwhelmed his previous knowledge of how the world operated. He saw how provisional and fraudulent the Big World was, and he ran into a store to buy champagne and potato chips to bring them back to her for a celebration of freedom. In the right light, this was a magnificent act, the act of a prince to his princess—and of course, after that, there was nothing for it but to fail along with her. He wrote to his parents, announcing his decision to drop out of college: “Dear Mom and Dad, I am finally taking responsibility for my own life. I think I’m about to discover a great truth, but I’m not sure what it is.”

 

He was, of course, about to discover the deepest extents of the Bright Forest, a world where anything might become beautiful. In the Bright Forest were green bottles and mossy curbsides, wet iron railings, bits of colored paper caught in the trees. A world like a fine photograph. He could see roads leading to dilapidated gas stations, sudden rocky overhangs, rows of maple, the gathering places of strangers. In the Bright Forest no one read newspapers on trains; they ran their fingers across the cold windowpanes, drawing circles. Later, at the station, people did not speak of schedules, they huddled against each other on benches and whispered. Or played guitars. Sometimes these same men and women would walk into the alleyways behind restaurants or lie naked together behind the hedges in a public park. In the Bright Forest, goals did not matter, only each step mattered, each momentary act—each meal of crackers and cheese, each raindrop in wintertime, each glance, each motion of the hand before the eyes. Sylvie and Gregory rented a shabby room together, got low-paying jobs, and before long the Bright Forest was everywhere: painted on the vinyl cushions of diner booths and tall against the blank stares of cars in parking lots. Each object in the natural world was but a marker for a potent force in the Bright Forest, each work along its paths a work of gods. In the distance, somewhere, was a lazy conductor beating a slow baton: Now you will sleep, will sleep, now you will make love. They would listen and lie together on long afternoons, would lose jobs for lying together on long afternoons.

 

Months passed effortlessly and grandly. Gregory let his head grow foggy and warm for whole weeks at a time. Sunlight would cross dusty rooms, grow weak with winter, strong with summer. He was for a long time a kind of prince, and in these, which he considered his finest hours, he was capable of the most royal actions: a quarter to a bum, a long night holding Sylvie when her father died. Prince Gregory could open his eyes to the near and the far and see them both as his dominion. Up close was Sylvie, her face, her hands, her frequent illnesses, her fears. In the distance were palaces: deeper glens, sea cliffs. Each palace they must find, or each palace would never be found by humankind, for there seemed to be no sight but their own. One afternoon in the year he was twenty would remain with Gregory for the rest of his life, a moment of greatness few people in this world can claim: the two of them standing on a small, grassy hill in a public park. A breeze was blowing, and hand in hand, the whole earth was telescoped into the power of Sylvie and Gregory, young and in love and owning it, just owning it all. Looking out, Gregory felt benevolence toward the scene, felt benevolence and generosity of spirit, as would any great man.

 

 

—

 

 

Over the course of four years, however, Sylvie and Gregory changed from eighteen to twenty, and then to twenty-two. Despite the best efforts of the forest, Sylvie discovered that Gregory retained ambitions. He found that she could sometimes look strong and serious. One night he brought a lamp up close to her face and declared that she had become a woman.

 

“Really?” she asked.

 

“Really,” he said.

 

She had no secrets from him, of course, and they began to talk about children. Carelessly, but they talked. “Imagine me having a baby,” Sylvie would say, squatting and pretending to pull a baby from her womb. “It would just come out, like this.” She did not know his secret term for their relationship, the “Bright Forest,” but she knew that theirs would be the first baby of some amazing world. This baby would walk with them hand in hand among its trees. They would found a dynasty born in the poverty of the Bright Forest. A dynasty!

 

Nevertheless, talk of a child triggered an ancient male fear which lay dormant but deep inside Gregory. Time, he saw, was hotting up. Conversations such as the following began to occur:

 

Gregory (condescendingly): “I don’t understand how you could have lost your fucking keys again. Look, I keep mine on this nail by the door. They’re always there and I can always find them.”

 

Sylvie (in tears): “What does it matter, Gregory? What does it fucking matter?”

 

Though such scenes became common, a greater threat arose. For the Bright Forest had a determined enemy, and his name was “Morning.” All was well when they slept in and kept the shades drawn, but sometimes Gregory would awake early with a curious restlessness, and, leaving Sylvie in the humid bedroom, he would walk out into the Morning. At Morning he heard the brass of trucks and streetcars, the cries of work and doing, could smell the clean hard smell of dew evaporating from the Big World, see mailmen. Eventually, Morning became a kind of religion with him. “Sylvie just doesn’t understand this,” he told himself, observing the early people and secretly smiling at their purpose. “These people understand something she just does not understand at all.” And when he returned to find Sylvie still asleep, the bedclothes warm to the touch and the shades peeking pinpricks of sunlight, when he touched the damp shine of sleep on her forehead and smelled the smell of long untidy human habitation, he began to be repelled.

 

Frightened, he’d close the door and go into the kitchen to make coffee. Once, he even called his parents for advice.

 

 

—

 

 

Sylvie began to sense a change in Gregory, and it became an uncomfortable joke between them that he was never home when she awoke. “I want to wake up together,” she would say. “We can open our eyes at the very same instant and then just lie there for a while before going to work or whatever.” And often, after his new routine of newspaper and coffee, Gregory would return to the bedroom, and, consciously steeling himself against—what, he didn’t know—he would crawl back into bed, and awaken her with much charm and grace. But this effort became deception and acting.

 

Gregory began to ask: was the Bright Forest merely a stepping stone to another, even finer world? And once that question had been asked, Morning was no longer enough. The idea of a baby born in the Bright Forest became more and more a threat. The Big World seemed more and more a release.

 

One day, Gregory got a real job downtown, to which he went at the appointed hours and worked not just for cash, but advancement. Such joy he took in arriving at a cold office in a gray a.m. would be hard to describe, but there he’d be, beaming inwardly to himself as he wrote things in files and passed messages to people in well-chosen clothing. At lunchtime, he would walk into the hustle of the city with a serious smile, and he would rejoice in the wind that tunneled through the office buildings and set the pant legs of busy men to flapping. The wind! Puzzling movements! Men themselves! The Big World held less beauty than the Bright Forest, but he found it strangely satisfying. He began to look collegiate again, tall and thin, with round glasses and a preppie vest. In the office he became liked, for he had a way of fixing his eyes on a person with an innocent concentration which brought him much good will.

 

His parents rejoiced that he had finally made a job last more than a few months. Hey, maybe he’d go back to school.

 

When Gregory told Sylvie that he enjoyed “this cycle of coming and going each day, being away from you and then with you again,” she at first believed him. She was too naive, perhaps, to realize what was going on. After all, what could really threaten the beauty of the Bright Forest? When he came home each day, she would throw herself around his neck and try to drag him into bed, but he would demur, would say he was tired, and again she would believe him. She didn’t realize that he had brought the Big World in with him, and that she, in her old sweater and sneakers, and with all that undisguised love in her eyes, looked merely out of place. Little by little, Gregory grew impatient with “her” cheap restaurants and “her” back roads, and he began to be repelled by sex. Seriously: a certain American Puritanism rose up in him against a life of pleasure. Worse, he now saw not a determined “poetry-in-real-life,” but a kind of desperate quality to all his days with Sylvie, an excess of beauty which might well appear ugly to the outsider. To people, for example, from his office.

 

At night, lying awake by Sylvie’s side, keeping a precious inch between himself and her flesh, Gregory would actually wonder how he could have given himself to this woman who was like none of the women he knew in his other, Big World of men and ideas. She, for example, could not keep facts straight and ask the right questions when taking a message over the phone. Just now, she was, for heaven’s sake, working in an organic food collective. She had no shine of rapid plans in her eyes, she wore no masculine jackets, and touched no colored shadows to her eyes.

 

“You should throw out that shirt,” he’d say. “It’s falling apart.”

 

“You look like a college boy in that jacket,” she would reply, as a joke. “Do they laugh at you at work?”

 

But he did not smile.

 

Late at night, he could hear the wind curl around the edges of the apartment building like a kind of warning, and sometimes, rising noiselessly, he would walk out onto the balcony and feel a kind of tremendous and lonely power in the darkness. At such times, even though it was not Morning, he would let a strength come into his limbs which thrilled him, which reminded him that he was young and might do anything. For a short time, at least, young.

 

 

—

 

 

In such a manner, little by little, Gregory became utterly alone from Sylvie, and entirely left the Bright Forest for the Big World. This should be no surprise: a new world is all we ever ask, and for the second time in his life, counting the moment he quit college, he felt mighty and free.

 

The final separation came in the worst way, when Sylvie was out of town, visiting her mother. Indeed, a whole month passed without a visit to the Bright Forest. Under the circumstances, far too long for it to survive.

 

During that month, Gregory relaxed visibly and worked late hours. So little did he think about Sylvie that he imagined that she did not think of him either. When he finally wrote his letter, on actual paper with a pen, he was sure it would come as no real surprise: “Dearest Sylvie, I’m sorry to write you a letter, but it must be done in a letter, if it is to be done at all. If you would find your own true strength, I know that you must leave me for a time. I am holding you back every moment we are together. We once said that the present should never destroy the beauty of the past, and in that spirit, I say that it has all been so beautiful that I am brought only to joy in looking back. You know what you have taught me, and I only hope the world can teach you what I cannot as time goes by. Write to me. Gregory.”

 

Lying face down on her childhood bed, Sylvie could only think of that word “strength.” Strength? What did strength have to fucking do with it? Either you stick with someone or you don’t. The letter had come at a dark moment with her mother, when she was hoping for a word from Gregory to cheer her, and now she thought the world had come to an end. Who was this jerk masquerading as Gregory, who had signed such a letter? A letter so full of ugliness and distrust? She reviewed the few weeks before their parting and could not remember having met this other Gregory, though looking back, she could see the signs that he had been growing inside her true Gregory.

 

“Now I am alone,” she thought, correctly.

 

This other Gregory grew a moustache, moved halfway across the country, enrolled at a new university—and after a few months he was no longer a child in the Bright Forest, but an adult in the Big World. City streets began to lose their shine and glimmer. He completed a tax return. He graduated. He obtained a job in a sales statistics firm. He fixed his own lunch to bring to work, and he began looking at advertisements for cameras and stereo systems and folding couches. In time he forgot the smell of women, or rather the women around him were so clean that he could not smell them through their blouses and sinless colognes.

 

About a third of the way into the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, there’s a curious moment when the chorus pauses for the orchestra to play a theme like a little brass band—a brief, bouncy military march, revving up for another grand entrance. Gregory whistled that little tune to himself almost every Morning. If he thought back to his time with Sylvie, he would say things like this to himself:

 

“Is it only the first moments of any new enterprise that set the whole image and beauty for what is to come? Surely everything that happened in that first moment beneath the oak when Sylvie’s hands roamed created everything that occurred in the next four years.”

 

Again and again he recalled specific moments of joy in the Bright Forest, but always he heard himself describing his former love to his new friends in disparaging terms: “Those were awful days after I left school, just floundering around. There was this girl who flunked out and took me with her. She, like, never grew up.”

 

But Gregory found no new woman in the Big World. And sure enough, six years further on, when he was nearing thirty, he began to dream again of making love to Sylvie. The dream of her would arise against his will around him in the night like a close and familiar room. He began to telephone her in Phoenix or Boulder or wherever she had moved that month and found himself talking to her in the small, childlike voice of his previous love.

 

“Sylvie?”

 

Sylvie was at first hesitant and kept her distance over the phone. Gregory took this as a sign of strength, and in his mind, judging by the new tone of her voice, his heart began to dress her in sleek, adult working jackets and straight slacks; he pictured her wearing makeup and staring him directly in the eye. Then she began to call, too. “Gregory,” would come the call. Each time, after they spoke, he would walk out into the city with new eyes and look briefly down graffiti-laden alleyways and into the beautiful shadows of the trees, revisiting the Bright Forest. But safely.

 

 

—

 

 

At last, one long holiday weekend, Gregory boarded a plane and met Sylvie in her latest town. Over the course of those six years, she had known many men and many jobs. Gregory had become the poet who was her first love, and her best, but who had abandoned her in some vague, artistic confusion. She lost her anger and told herself they had had to part in order to grow up. She could now speak in a more direct manner, dress in well-kept skirts (though not sleek adult jackets), own a car, make plans in advance, offend people less often, and generally pass as a citizen of the Big World.

 

When Gregory arrived, therefore, he was at first perfectly enchanted. He felt his fondest wish had come true. Sylvie had gained all the strength he had spoken of in his heartless letter! They went out to dinner without even holding hands, and Gregory was magnificent with charming talk and generous public behavior. He had learned how to smoke cigarettes, and he displayed this new talent with bravado, blowing smoke into a warm summer night. Sylvie, in her turn, acted witty, and she looked at him with the indulgence of a former lover, now grown mature, gently hinting at the secrets they had in the past, and laughing indulgently at the right moments.

 

Like in a movie made by the Big World.

 

No one in the restaurant looked at them oddly or suspected them to be refugees from another world altogether. And back at her apartment, they went about the business of getting ready for bed with coy efficiency. When the lights went out, Gregory crawled into Sylvie’s bed with confidence, eager to make love like men do to women in the Big World.

 

On the second day, however, Sylvie didn’t bother to comb her hair as carefully. Gregory overslept.

 

On the third day, spent idly at a beach, they didn’t walk as they’d both intended, with pants rolled and shoes held discreetly, but instead sprawled in the sand, making a mess with sandwich wrappers. Sylvie forgot to mention the plans she had for Gregory to meet her new friends—annoying and confusing him.

 

And by the end of the fourth day, when he awoke dreamy and lost, and looked deeply into the waxy magnolia leaves that rattled outside Sylvie’s window, he lost sight of Morning. He saw only that the Bright Forest had sprung up lush and fantastic from the ground all around them, once again. All day they slept and woke, slept and woke, missing the appointment to meet her friends. It wasn’t their fault, Gregory thought. When they got together, everything just went to hell.

 

As anyone will tell you, much is changed in one’s life merely by having a regular job. And so, even though he delayed his return flight until late into the night, Gregory did eventually drag himself to the airport.

 

For a time, as they sat together waiting for his flight to depart, it’s true that everyone else looked like a stranger.

 

Only after their final kiss, and when he found himself alone on the airplane, did Gregory begin to think about how to organize the next day. He checked his messages. His calendar. A few minutes later, he felt the vast cool relief of flying into the Big World forever.

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Insomnia

Night works a dark purple down the loom.

Again, I watch dawn unravel those rows,

 

a weaving and unweaving no less coy

than Penelope producing her burial shroud.

 

Please let today end. I am desperate to feel better

and know days will trudge past this point with me in tow.

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