A Labor and a Language of Love
(or, What Are You Gonna Do with that Humanities PhD?)

Once upon a time, before I was a nurse and a student midwife, I went to graduate school with a very different goal in mind: a PhD in English. Fresh out of undergrad, with vague ideas about feminism and about changing the world, a love of books, and precious few ideas about what I could do with my degree, I left the city in which I’d spent my entire life and moved to California to become an academic. Many things changed while I was in grad school– I met new people and lost touch with others, I got married, I had two daughters– but others remained the same– I still considered myself a book-loving feminist, and I still wanted to change the world. And by the time I was in the dissertation phase, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do with my degree; the problem was I was going to have to earn yet another one to accomplish it.

Pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood left profound marks on me, ones which gave me a sense of purpose and direction I’d always lacked. It’s not that I just loved being pregnant (though it wasn’t so bad), really, or that childbirth was a walk in the park (quite the opposite); but I learned so much about myself during this time, and perhaps more importantly, about the ways in which American women become mothers. I started my first daughter’s pregnancy with an obstetrician who had been assigned to me by my school’s health plan. I thought she was fine, though I was frustrated each visit by her (and her staff’s) inability to tell me anything concrete about what birth would be like. What would my room be like? What options would be available for pain control and relaxation aside from epidurals? How much would my co-pay be? I was shut down at every turn, because it was apparently too soon to consider such questions. This didn’t sit right with me; the day I birthed my daughter was going to be one of the most significant days of my life. Surely it was reasonable for me to want to plan for it ahead of time!

To make a long story short, we left the OB. There was a lot of thought, research, and debate involved, but looking back it almost feels providential; one day I had assumed midwives were a thing of the nineteenth century, and the next I was planning a birth at home. To make an even longer story short, my first child ended up being born in a hospital–with a midwife, and almost every single intervention I’d hoped to avoid. It took time for me to completely come to terms with that outcome, but needless to say, her birth day was the happiest day of my life to that point, epidural and all.

Though it was not the low-tech waterbirth I’d imagined, my first baby’s birth taught me so much, and challenged many of the assumptions I’d held. Having experienced the gamut of obstetrical interventions, as well as the absolute ecstasy of meeting my daughter, I realized that these experiences were not mutually exclusive. What seemed to matter more than anything was how supported a woman felt while she was experiencing birth; and as some of my more dogmatic views began to fall away, I realized that a beautiful birth could happen in an abundance of settings, from a birth tub to an operating room– provided that the birth attendants treated the process, and the family, with nothing short of reverence.

Sadly, this is often not the case in American maternity care. One in three babies are delivered surgically, and it’s not because women are banging down the door for cesarean sections. While I fully support a woman’s right and ability to choose a c-section as her preferred mode of birth, I do not feel the same about many providers’ tendencies to rush the process for reasons that often have little to do with the health of mother or baby. And beyond that, I certainly cannot get down with the tendency in maternity care to treat women like mere vessels for reproduction. The birth of a baby is also the birth of a mother; it’s high time we honor that fact. A woman should not have to flee the medical setting to retain her dignity and human rights, but as a result of a frightening confluence of legislation and trends in medical practice (and, to be fair, malpractice, as litigation has an unfortunate effect of practice regardless of evidence), this has, for many women, become a reality. And it was here, at the intersection of a patriarchal medical establishment and an increasingly conservative legislative environment that seeks to constrain more and more what can constitute women’s health care, that I found my calling: I was born to be a midwife. And in spite of the fact that I had planned two homebirths and experienced one (the other best day of my life), I was going to follow my calling right to the place I’d sworn I’d never go when I was pregnant: the hospital.

Sometimes, when I explain the (admittedly unique) trajectory of my career path, I hear something along the lines of, “So you’re not going to use your English PhD?” This question, which often feels like a tacit criticism of my inability to decide what I want to do with myself within an appropriate timeframe, bothers me because it implies that the value of my education lies only in the job it entitles me to get, and, implicitly, that there’s no place for the humanities within the medical world. Such comments reflect deeply held, but rarely interrogated, biases about what kinds of education are worth pursuing and what it means to put one’s education to work in the world.

It would be easy to respond by saying, “No, teaching wasn’t really for me” (which would be a lie), or by decrying the current state of the academic job market for humanities PhD (which is a sad truth, but was not the primary reason I left academia). And I confess, rather shamefully, that I’ve gone down both of these roads before. But the more honest answer is that I am absolutely going to “use” my English PhD– or rather, what I learned to do while in pursuit of it– “forever til the day I die” (to quote a nursing instructor of whom I am particularly fond).

As both a nursing student and a patient, I have encountered repeated instances of clinicians and other health professionals using strikingly inappropriate language to talk to and about the people they are caring for. This is especially true in women’s health, a field that is positively rife with, for lack of a fancier term, bad language. Let’s begin with a seemingly benign example. When a baby is born, we often describe him or her as having been “delivered.” This paradigm has become a commonplace, but what do we really mean when we say “delivered”? Delivered from what? Evil? What are we actually talking about when we use the words “delivery” and “deliverance”? The postal service? Or something more transcendent? Despite the mysterious referent, the verb “delivered” does suggest a clear subject: the doctor or midwife who is assisting with the birth.

This concept is incredibly disenfranchising to mothers, as it obscures the fact that, hard as a birth attendant might work to help a woman have a baby, no one in that room experiences the inherent intensities of childbirth, both mental and physical, as acutely as the mother. This is as true for mothers having c-sections as for mothers having unmedicated vaginal births on their bedroom floors. And we can add to the notion of “delivery” a host of related linguistic issues, such as what they will and will not “let” them do in labor, or using threats and coercion to get them to agree to care. Shortly after I arrived at the hospital during my first labor, I was informed by the on-call OB that he needed to draw my blood for typing because I could bleed to death in minutes during childbirth. Points for subtlety, no? And on the day of my first child’s birth, which happened the following afternoon, I had to aggressively assert my right to not have hourly, painful vaginal exams to a midwife who hadn’t come looking for my consent in the first place, and to practically beg for more time to labor. Though baby and I were apparently tolerating things just fine, and though my body was showing the signs of slow but steady change, she was convinced that I couldn’t do it. “We have to look at other options,” she said. “You’re not making good progress,” she said. “This baby is too big for you,” she said. Do you think she apologized for those statements when my daughter came flying into her hands just over an hour later? And my story probably isn’t typical– so many times have I heard a similar first birth story end in the OR for “failure to progress,” an and equally vague rationale given for cesarean sections. A more honest way of putting it may, in many cases, be “failure to wait” on the part of the provider– and something tells me that this shifting of responsibility might prompt a change in vocabulary away from a notion of “failure.”

Sylvia Hoffert has offered some historical context for the way we talk about pregnancy and birth in her study of women’s writing (both private and public). She identifies a notable and sudden nineteenth-century shift from use of the word “travail” to describe the labor process– a word that is heavy with the weight of a woman’s work– to the term “illness”– which implies weakness, passivity, and pathology.¹ Though this use of “illness” has fallen out of vogue in our present day, we still retain its legacy: pregnant women are stricken with “baby brain” (though this theory has been ) and are treated as though their decision-making capacities are suddenly impaired (as evidenced by the increasing tendency in our society to ). As far as I can tell, based on the sheer number of human beings I see walking around me, pregnancy and childbirth are pretty normal. While the symptoms of pregnancy can range from bizarre to occasionally debilitating, the act of growing and birthing a child is, in and of itself, not a pathophysiologic process at all; it is very much the opposite. My own childbirth experiences (which you can read about in detail and ) were very challenging; both defied my expectations in many ways. However, both experiences made me reach deep inside myself for a strength I did not know was there, and those lessons will always live with me. The positive effect of my births on my self-image and my overall health (I have, for example, discovered a love for distance running) has been profound.

This is not to say that women never encounter problems in the process. Miscarriages, for example, are incredibly common; given their high prevalence (anywhere from one in ten to one in five pregnancies, or more, depending on who you ask) we might say that they are actually quite normal, too. Miscarriage, like childbirth, is a subject fraught with so much emotion for so many women (and men!). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also a terrain on which we encounter a great deal of bad language, to say the least. Women who have had recurrent miscarriages are labeled “habitual aborters”– yes, that’s a real diagnosis. Aside from the problematic cultural associations tied to this phrasing, the applied suffix– abort-er– implies agency on the part of a woman for her pregnancy losses (and this is, not accidentally, a chilling parallel to the rising trend to criminalize pregnancy losses of various kinds, which I have gestured to above). And not only agency– this woman has made aborting a “habit.” No matter the circumstances of an abortion, be it spontaneous or induced, I cannot see the parallel to things like nail biting. Stopping at the coffee shop before work is a “habit”; experiencing an abortion, whatever the cause, and however many preceded it, is surely something else. Cervices that are atypically short and dilate before the due time are described as “incompetent,” like foolhardy employees who just don’t get it, who are negligent and even dangerous. Childbearing women over the age of 35, whose pregnancies are sometimes challenged in different ways than those of their younger counterparts, are termed “elderly”; this is in spite of the fact that the average age of first childbearing is continually rising in the United States, as women are choosing to delay motherhood. Now, if you were to walk up to a random thirty-five year old woman and call her any of these things, I would say you should expect a swift kick in the shins. So why is it ok (or rather, standard) for medical professionals to engage with this kind of language? Are we so indebted to tradition that we cannot rethink these labels? Is this just what we do in the name of “objectivity”?

If that is the case, then I object to objectivity. Go ahead, tell me I’m being nitpicky or overly sensitive. But if I learned anything in the years I devoted to the study of language and literature, it’s that, at the end of the day, all we’ve really got is language. And once we have it, it structures our thought and action. Nothing can really happen outside of language. Even if you walked around for a whole day determined not to speak a word, your thoughts would continue to move along in narrative fashion. Language is the way we construct our reality. So when we train people to use language that is, at best, insensitive, and, at worst, offensive, we are also teaching them to think about other human beings in these ways. And because our thoughts structure our actions, we are thus teaching them to treat other human beings in these ways. I think there’s some kind of an old adage about not saying things about people you would not want them to hear. Well, maybe we shouldn’t write things in people’s charts that we wouldn’t want them to read, either. Before you object, please, tell me the therapeutic value of calling someone a “habitual aborter”– because I can’t figure it out. It’s one thing for providers to use technical jargon; that may well be par for the course. But that’s clearly not what I’m talking about here. I see a big difference between a term such as “habitual aborter” and something like “hyperinsulinemia” (a fancy way to say “too much insulin in the blood stream”). I’m not suggesting that we do away with diagnoses; these categories can be useful tools for clinicians in considering what might be going on with someone and what can be done about it. What I am suggesting is that we employ diagnoses that actually describe the reality we are addressing in a humane and helpful way– in a way that enables, rather than hinders, a positive, respectful relationship between provider and patient.

Perhaps if our national record in women’s health were totally stellar, I would feel less justified in my critique. However, it is dismal. At last count, we were one of only eight nations in which maternal mortality rates actually (alongside such war torn countries as Afghanistan). This is in spite of (and perhaps related to) the fact that one of three births is a c-section. Black women in New York City are dying at a rate than their white counterparts. Income level continues to influence birth outcomes, and low income remains predictive of . Over half of American pregnancies are unintended, despite the availability of myriad effective means of birth control. And, more broadly speaking, our failures in women’s health care reflect larger failures: one-quarter of American women have experienced severe domestic violence in their lives, and . Something is seriously wrong here. Violence against women is systemic, and what I am arguing is that bad language on the part of health care workers plays an important role in perpetuating it by objectifying and alienating women– and by indicating to them that it is normal to feel badly about their bodies and that they should become used to feeling uncomfortable and even insulted. And when the teachers of new health care providers model bad language to their students, be it by making gross generalizations based on race or sexual orientation, or simply by discouraging them from questioning the linguistic status quo, they are ensuring that this problem will continue ad infinitum.

One thing I learned while studying the literature of early America was that we need to deal the problems that sometimes attend the linguistic choices of old white men of days gone by. This is true in medicine, too. The entire profession of obstetrics was founded on the idea– however well-meaning its proponents may have been– that women were too weak and stupid to do childbirth without male supervision and intervention. Even though midwifery is making a comeback, and an increasing proportion of new obstetricians are women, our training remains steeped in patriarchy. When I step outside the cozy confines of Varney’s Midwifery onto a labor and birth unit that schedules nearly all its births and that employs practitioners who cut episiotomies on nearly all the mothers they see, (and the breadth of evidence suggesting how detrimental it actually is), I am reminded of this. A provider can only feel comfortable engaging in outdated and dangerous practice, and maybe even doing so in a way that is downright cruel, when he or she lacks respect for his or her patients– and is so caught up in this way of doing medicine that he or she cannot even recognize it as disrespectful (see as an example which suggests that some hypersensitive women “misinterpret” advice as bullying, thus downplaying what has been identified as a serious problem). These outward displays of disrespect proceed from modes of thought that are ingrained and persist through language. So, while I wouldn’t suggest that every future physician or nurse go ahead and get a PhD in English before entering practice, I think there is an important case to be made for an increased attention to the realm of the linguistic at all levels of medical training, and, in turn, a reconsideration of our tendency to privilege “hard” science over the (soft?) humanities. Ultimately, our language begets, and becomes, our practice. We strive at every turn to avoid malpractice; we will only help this cause if we simultaneously work against “bad” language.

 

¹Hoffert, Sylvia D. Private Matters: American Attitudes toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800-1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

 

 

Samantha Tamulis is a registered nurse, as well as a student midwife at Yale University. She completed a dissertation in early American literature, entitled The Birth of the Mother: Conceptions of Maternity in American Literature, 1650-1859, in 2013, and continues to write on the subject while she works as a nurse, studies the art of midwifery, and enjoys life in New England with her family.

There are few poets in America who generate as much excitement among poets and critics alike as Dorothea Lasky. Her radically straightforward diction and deadpan delivery have generated some of the most talked about collections in recent American poetry: Awe (2007), Black Life (2010) and Thunderbird (2012), all from indie super-presence Wave Books. In her most recent collection, Rome, her first with the revived (and storied) Norton imprint Liveright, Lasky pushes her now-recognizable voice into a desperately new register, and the direction is incredibly promising. Though these poems at time spin their wheels to little effect (or affect), there are as many or more moments when their witchy self-talk seems to break through its own artifice, establishing contact with something entirely other.

“Is it true that all trees are the same
All houses are the same
Is it true that all people are the same
We eat from the same china
And the sound is similar
A very similar sound”

(February 21st)

In the late eighties and early nineties, as grunge began to bleed into the mainstream, Daniel Johnston gained underground notoriety among musicians and artists for the weird, un-self-conscious songs he would write and sing directly into his tape player—tapes he would then copy and hand out to strangers on the street or at local gigs. Part of Johnston’s art is its lack of artifice: it is seductive because it carries with it no pretense to “talent” in any conventional sense.

Art like Johnston’s begs many questions: does he know he can’t sing? Is he aware that the quality of his art is its artlessness? Is he being ironic? It is necessarily uneven, as evenness is a product of stingy editorialism—and the genius of the art, when it really finds its stride, is the sensation of pure thought—a slipstream of yeses without whiff of a no. 

Lasky’s poetics channel something of Johnston’s powerful lack of pretense—the difference is that we know Lasky can sing. Johnston’s brilliance was his art’s power over and against the lack of traditional “talent” of its artist—Lasky, though, is unbearably talented.

“Dear friend, I would paint your eyes anywhere
The elements so mixed up in me
That Nature might stand up and say: Now this is a man!

And when they burn me up into the trees
I hope you are the trees”

 (Poem for My Friend)

There are moments in Lasky’s oeuvre that conjure some of the greatest voices in the history of the avant-garde: Rimbaud, Lorca, Stein, Ashbery and O’Hara. Which is why it’s such an odd experience to read a poem like, “Diet Mountain Dew.” It begins:

“Something that I have
Thought of recently
Was my Diet Mountain Dew
Bottle in the kitchen refrigerator
I would like to be
Home
I would like to go
Home and to the places
Where people like me
It is really hard to
Keep the output
At an input
I go
And no one gives
A shit
All they want
Is the gift
Without even knowing
All the Diet Mountain Dew
That went into it…”

Does she know she can sing? It’s a fascinating effect, and not necessarily a problem. After all: there is something incredibly refreshing about poetry so radically unencumbered. But still: at times the poems seem so content with surfaces that their lack of depth calls into question their necessity. If Frank O’Hara turned chattiness into art in what he famously labeled his, “I do this, I do that poems,” Lasky at times contents herself to a kind of, “I like this, I like that…” posture that threatens to be consumed by its own triviality.

“I feel pity for the stars, the blue stars, and the red stars
And the green stars, I feel pity for the stars that shoot sparks
And the green-grey
I feel pity for the colors
I feel pity for this room”

 (I Feel Pity)
There are moments of head-scratching simplicity in Lasky’s poetics, and that simplicity can be difficult to trust. However, in Rome, more than in any of her books to date, Lasky sings. And when she sings, the musings of an ego break through to something profoundly other: as though someone kept talking to the Ouija board and then it started talking back.

“What a blank and edible flower
The lilac is
It is as if your face
Were there inside of me

Or on that tree
White-lined
And inside your heart
A glowing purple, a glowing green

It is as if I had made you believe
In me once again
It is as if you knew I was your true love
It was as if I didn’t have to know

In this life
All you were to me
Was that flower” (Lilac)

When Lorca brought to duende America, ancient Spanish spiritism was for the first time in contact with the fast, black guts of the greatest city in the world. Lasky’s Rome moves in the opposite direction, from the butcher paper, boombox-recorded stack of mix-tapes of the American demotic toward something more ancient and Old World, something deeply rooted in the history of poetry.

“I write you
From above an ocean

Wilted and stale flower
I used to think you were odd

Until you burst in my mouth
Like the most obvious thing

All in all I was glad I had had
Another moment in the rain with you” (You Think Language Is Silly Until It Happens to You)

There is incredible tenderness here, a tenderness reminiscent of Robert Desnos, the greatest love poet of Surrealism. Like Desnos, Lasky is capable of blending devastating vulnerability with surprising buoyancy. And because of Lasky’s straightforward diction, the thought patterns of these poems are relatively easy to track, which is more artistically daring than it might appear at first glance. Poetry, as a medium of thought, often blurs itself in complexity of image or diction or allusion. In many ways, this is the legacy of Modernism, and each subsequent development in the avant-garde has defined itself largely (or, in some cases, entirely) by its resistance to meaning. Lasky’s poems, too, resist meaning, but not by any sleight of the hand whereby the reader is left in the dust of lyric or the density of syntax—they speak plainly. And it is this feature—plainspoken-ness—which makes the sublimity of Lasky’s work so profound (and its frustrations so prominent). The poems resist epiphany and intellect—a resistance that produces tremendous, original energy.
“There was a lonely summer

Where I took the string and unraveled the magic circle from everything

It was because of you, and what you did to me

No it was winter

When I drank cola right by his head

The girl said her poem was called Winter

The boy said his name was The Sea

If I could have wrapped you in purple robes

For the rest of my life

I would have” (Winter)

It is appropriate, then, that Lasky’s most startlingly avant-garde contribution to date would come from Liveright, the imprint that almost a century ago published Eliot, Pound, H.D. and E.E. Cummings. Like the greatest Modernists, Lasky’s work is important precisely because of the way it complicates the conversation between the old and the new, the avant-garde and the mainstream. Most admirably, it demands the conversation take place on its own terms, and it is absolutely uncompromising in this.

“

You walking towards me
In the ghostly smoke

When you took off your raincoat
It was not to keep you hungry

It was not to keep you simple
It was to keep you wet

Wet and violent flower
That I shook at the people

When I described you as an ocean
It was because I was still close to it

” (You Think Language Is Silly Until It Happens to You)

To read Lasky is, for better and worse, to overhear an original mind thinking aloud to itself. At their worst, Lasky’s poems are art, just the most indulgent kind: self-amused, insular and a bit obnoxious. At their best, though, they push through boredom into something quasi-spiritual: something like the electric mind of Surrealism. Since appearing on the scene with Awe in 2007, her poems have pushed the limits of ego to various effect, and while Rome at times reverts to old habits, it signals a breakthrough in Lasky’s aesthetic where ego is transformed into something sublime—where, as in the heights of Rimbaud, “I” truly becomes an “Other”.

 

Dorothea Lasky—Rome
Liveright 2014
Page Length: 144
Retail: $23.95

Notable Poems: Winter; I Remember in the Morning; February 21; Lilac; You Think Language Is Silly Until It Happens to You; What Is a Man if Not a Siphon; Poem for My Friend; The Art Deco of the West

 

Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).

Anyone with decent vision can spot the differences in the two photographs below, but to fully appreciate each incarnation of this house as a work of art, you must first know something about .

The Heidelberg Project was started by Tyree Guyton, with his grandfather, Sam Mackey, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1986. They started The Heidelberg Project in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood, on the east side of Detroit, on Heidelberg Street. Tyree had come back home from serving in the military, and was shocked and saddened to see that his old neighborhood had begun to deteriorate. Crime rates were high, and community morale was low. Tyree embarked on an optimistic, tenacious, ultimately very successful project to transform his neighborhood to an indoor-and-outdoor art museum, maintained not just by artists but also by the community. He started by painting a series of houses on the street that had fallen into disrepair — with bright dots of color, sometimes attaching salvaged items from within the houses themselves. Soon, The Heidelberg Project began attracting visitors from other neighborhoods, and eventually even tourists from other cities.

In 2013 and 2014, several houses of The Heidelberg Project were destroyed by separate acts of arson. No perpetrator has been caught, and the houses were damaged beyond repair. Rather than despair, however, the folks at THP — led by Tyree — simply turned the burned-out shells into something new and newly lovely. One example of this is below: you can see the “before/after” photos of Soul House. It makes the “after” shot even more amazing to know that THP artists didn’t create that new incarnation themselves; they were helped by Detroit’s Chapter 412 of United Auto Workers. Belief in art by the community, for the community — and its redemptive, unifying power — emanates from these images.

 

House of Soul and House of Soul Memorial Installation at The Heidelberg Project

Artist: Tyree Guyton / Project Manager: Trista Dymond

 

Repeating the Alarm
…when he sings he has the most wonderful voice. —Hillary Cook, dentist

The neighbor’s house is an empire
and the empire is shut tight tonight.
And all the lights are off
in the empire and all the doors are locked
keeping everything imperial inside, where it

leans toward the window
unseen.

The monkeys scream in the trees,
green vervet complete their circle of noise in the leaves.
Leaves shake down
and they stay in the trees.

The boy’s dark skin is worn
white at the knees.
The empire has him tied to a bed.
Teeth cracked from bark and bone,
tough love, the sinewed arms.
A light coat of fur covers his chest
and his back.

The boy cannot eat stew or any cooked food.
Yet he fingers fork tines, fingers a spoon.
The boy cannot stand upright
without the help of a chair or the stump in the yard
or the girl who talks soft
and knows not to look in his eyes.

When the boy removes clothing
and pisses in dirt
the dust rises
and the empire closes its arms.
Gives back the pants,
cooks the food.
The boy learns to straighten his legs,
let loose of the stump, the chair,
but never the girl.
Until their eyes meet.

Empire teaches him “pot,”
teaches him “pan.”
The monkeys scream in the trees.

Empire fixes teeth,
gives the boy voice,
and a guitar.
He goes on tour standing upright,
he goes on tour and he sings.

 
Let’s Make it Big Like Last Time

It starts with a ride in a beat-down K-car,
a few cigarettes.
You will sleep on an air mattress
in Friendship, PA with a popular boy;
he will name all twenty-nine girls he’s been with,
first and last names.
You will both ignore the fag huffing Gauloises in the papasan,
spilling French ash between the pages
of a borrowed copy of Harry Mathews’ Singular Pleasures.

You will take two hours to fall in love with the boy
and you will never date but the love will last long time.

You will fall in love with his ex-girlfriend and live with her for a while.
Once she has broken your heart you will take too strong to whiskey
and fall down your apartment’s spiral stairs.
Many, many times.

You will move to Atlanta, Georgia and be miserable for five years.
Then, when your father gets married you will go there, to southern California
with the popular boy for your date. He lives there now.
He is much older now, and so are you.
And you hate his girlfriend,
but after staying with them, you like her just a little bit.
Then you like her a lot.

The night before your father’s wedding you will smoke several joints with the boy
and talk about the people you know in common.
You will talk about the bets you used to make,
and how you won all but that last one.
You will get to the liquor store too late;
it is a small town.
You will buy Boone’s Farm and 99 Bananas at the AM/PM.
You will drink them in the PM, and then the AM.
You will get very messy with the boy in the car.
You will return to your father’s house stinking of booze;
he will be sitting upright on his couch at 3AM in his wedding suit—nerves.
He is a born again Christian, eight years sober, eight years celibate.
He will forget to say goodbye to you after the wedding.

On the way back to the boy’s house you will ask about his girlfriend.
You will think of three as a prime number.
Things will not go well,
as things sometimes don’t.
For a while you will speak to neither of them.
The boy will become famous and you will miss him,
but you will never admit to this weakness.

You will think about the girl every day for the next twelve years.

You will date other people, mostly girls.
One day you will marry. All while remembering
the blue eyes on both of them, her blonde hair,
and the way she taps her fingers on the closest surface
when she’s trying to remember something.

When you are passing through her town you will look her up.
She will answer her door and your heart will stop and you will look at her hands.
Her apartment will have paint- and ink-stained carpets
and smell like curry from the neighbors next door.
You will get tacos from the taco stand in the Von’s parking lot
and you will not talk about the boy.
You will never talk about the boy.
It is as if he is in the room and you are both ignoring him.

You will have three drinks apiece at the Reno Room; it is a Sunday night
and no one is there but the bartender, the bartender’s friend,
and two old men who stare at soccer on the TV.
In a back booth of sticky red leather
more than a decade condenses into a point of light
from a car commercial on TV,
reflected off the mirror
behind the bar, through your empty glass,
and onto the back of her hand.

 
Autologous and Caul

Gulls mob the pylons, drop styrofoam
bits and fishbones. And what’s left
of the storm paws open my coat.

It’s winter, but you wouldn’t know it.
Joggers jog sleeveless and boys in shorts
hunt for I don’t know what along docks,
faces staring down at the slats.

Sunslant reds ships’ sides,
and that damp curve of sand.
Brackish swell slaps wet trash against stone,
and the breakwater leeches thin slips of oil into the sea.

On the pier old men on upturned buckets
tap feet as transistor radios make a racket.
And each fishing line meets the deep
in a slackening C.

There were boys on the wrecked
bridge that day. On upturned buckets,
fishing.

Rebar curled up from cracked asphalt.
I had nothing but worry and bad
cafeteria food in me,
grey potatoes and Salisbury steak.

Her room was so green,
pulsed with pale noise,
smelled of fake lavender and plastic wrap.

On the bridge one boy said gun in Spanish
and pointed. But it was only my camera.

Camera, I said, estoy tomando cuadros.
I blocked the sun with my hand.

The boy stood, palm on the knife
hooked to his belt, hip cocked sideways.

I took a picture of him,
made the clicking sound with my tongue,
hooked a few shots of blue through the holes
pocking pavement, turned back.

Steam plant churned the hospital
like it was on fire.

She died that night, mouth open,
blood never got right.

The boy is still
in my camera, sun bright on rubble, wind wild,
life still a matter of odds.

 

Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010) and Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014). She lives in the Pacific Northwest and is editor for Jaded Ibis Press’s Bowerbird series.

In Kristy Bowen’s dream-like, three-part jewel, The Shared Properties of Water and Stars (, 2014), Bowen describes her own work as a “strange little fairy tale.” Broken up into three parts, the poems radiate a murky symbolism that is mysterious and sexualized, echoing and promising violence: women carry boxes of sadness, lace drags on the ground, sometimes the lace is blood-stained. Hundreds of bears lumber and low softly outside the windows.

There is also mystery — a forest, ghosts who carry tangerines. Elegant descriptions and short sentences propel the reader down a surreal, prose-poetic rabbit hole:

“There are three houses in three different colors. Each owner keeps a certain kind of sadness locked in the cupboard. The tall man lives in the white house. The short man keeps rabbits as pets…The woman in the second house keeps her sadness in a smallish box…The girl with the blonde hair lives next door to the man who keeps rabbits. One summer the rabbits multiply and chew through the fence.”

At this turn, the characters are nameless. There is a woman in a white dress, and a woman in a red dress who waits for “significant damage — to sprout feathers or scales.” These characters tease us with what we think we know — that everyone mostly “keeps to themselves” — but Bowen ultimately proves it is impossible for these subjects not to affect one another. The blonde girl goes from the innocent pastime of “ lining up her lipsticks on the coffee table” to cutting class and entering into a romantic relationship with the rabbit owner — referred to as the rabbit man — who has been watching her:

“In the basement, the rabbit man runs his tongue along the space between her fingers and thumb. It rains for days like this. The light is gray inside him (mostly air) (mostly fur).”

It is through the relationship between the blonde girl and the rabbit man that Bowen’s fairytale evolves, stretching the boundaries of the status quo. The rabbit man perhaps dreams of becoming a rabbit at night (or maybe he already is one? Bowen leaves this ambiguous). Such physical mutations serve a purpose in Bowen’s fairy tale: the characters manifest inner development through actual “outside” changes of body and environment.

“She guesses he dreams about moving quickly through the forest, past the edges of town and through the dark. Slight as his weight will carry him. She shivers and pulls the blanket closer while the bears outside fall, finally asleep.”

Bowen blends these themes of appearance and revelation through the text in other ways, including the presence of riddles. Reveals are like trap doors at the bottom of the lake Bowen describes in a dream. And dreams, too, are important for what they do and do not show us:

“In a dream, the woman in the white dress comes across a bear and a rabbit in the forest. Both of them furred, strange beings. The bear lies every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and the other days he speaks the truth. The rabbit lies on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, however the other days of the week he speaks the truth.
Bear: Yesterday I was lying.
Rabbit: So was I.”

What is revealed and what is hidden can be fluent and mischievous, like waves, as are physical bodies and minds. We, Bowen’s readers, smoothly blend into our homes, our storage units, our pets.

By Part III, I was deeply entrenched in Bowen’s own songs of experience. All of the objects, characters, and symbols from the earlier two sections begin to intermingle. Boxes might be labeled with an “X,” or they are hidden in the garage and then forgotten. A kiss might hide a trail of blood. The bears roam through the houses at night and step over the beds of those who sleep.

“The woman in the red dress was young once, her skin and insides sweet as violets. The bears were only beginning to escape from their cages then, only beginning to devour her fingers and lumber over her bed each night when she was alone. Softer, she whispered when she felt their teeth. Softer.”

While the women, the bears, the ghosts, and the riddles play, it is the bear who comes more into focus towards the book’s end. He ushers endangered rabbits into the forest — that space where the domestic meets the feral — in hopes of saving them. The three parts of this collection combine so effortlessly, I read the words, envisioned circles in my head, not remembering where the blonde girl ends up and is the bear boy alone or safe on the last page? Like any beloved fairy tale, I re-read its words — and follow the lead of the blond girl:

“On good nights, the girl counts the stars on the roof and hides the telephone in the closet.”

 

is the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications), Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2014), and Backyard Poems (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2015.) Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in public places in Iowa City. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, Toad: the Journal, The Poetry Storehouse, Quail Bell Magazine, Flapperhouse, and Hobart. She also writes for Insecurity Ragazine.

 

 

Mary Tewksbury is a whiskey-swiggin’, bluegrass-pickin’ singer-songwriter from upstate New York, who frequently performs solo, as well as with the band Next to Kin. She got this tattoo to carry with her a representation of “strong and beautiful women taking a hold of life.” For Tewks, this concept is bound up with her love of music. She chose the spot for her ink — her right upper arm — based upon the old idea that the right side of the body conveys a public image to the world (when having one’s palms read, for example, the right palm frequently suggests what personal traits one is comfortable displaying as a public image, or the identity you want to project to people around you). “This is the comfortable side of me,” she explains. “Music is my truest passion in lfe.”

Her tattoo artist, , has spent the past several years working at , a tattoo shop in upstate New York.

BY INDUSTRY AND INGENUITY

Whatever gowns you wear for the gala dances—
the fabrics exotic against fingertips, the bottoms flowing

behind your feet with your stride, hugging a shape buried
within, colors unnatural and explosive, hems spreading

out in designs common of ornate carpets or awnings—
these are all a language untranslatable to me, guttural

and non Latin. Are we trying to buck perception,
the enveloping sea? This is a culture of ornament,

of collections. Some contain gazes, some victims. Imagine
taking a limo around a busy block and rolling the window

down so just your gloved hand can wave at the pedestrians
as they look and try to find a recognizable face, understand

the way that whoever within has had her hopes realized.
It’s not terrible, but it sounds like it when we’re on one

side of the glass. Cover yourself in tinsel, let the police
figure out who the real victim is later. It might be months

or it might be days. Take somebody’s hand, show somebody
the safe door out of the dance. Fashion, colors, movies and glamour.

 

 

 

ABENDDÄMMERUNG

You lay back on the orange couch, and I’ll lay back
on the yellow. I feel like an enemy. All eyes upon
my back. The gears and pulleys directing each of you
much different than those directing me. We’re intricate
creatures of impulse and shot. Let me out. Who put up
these fences, who put up this razor wire. I can take it.
Give it. A circle of glass and the bulb hanging limply
on frayed wire above the street. Two energies meeting
and two energies ending. I know enough. At the airport,
there are planes departing for hundreds of cities, more.
Security devices that blow puffs of air from many
angles, that make us visible down to our skin, our bodies
pressed into our clothes, trying to escape. The billboard
displays a blonde family smiling at their new wicker
chairs. I didn’t sign up for this. I’ve never had a deep
cut, but I can imagine what metal on bone would feel
like, the alarms it would ring. Something wrong, move.
Give it to me. You don’t want to hurt me, and I don’t
want to hurt you. Not in particular. The dimmest center.
Look down past the gum and the paint. This is the best
way to live, of all the other uncertain varieties of sorrow.

 

 

 

MICHIGAN BLONDES

I’m not myself I’m not

well sinuses akimbo head

a pocket of rat traps every

where is a woman with

a full head a man who has

a full body can you trust

the constellation of each

body the ability of every

organ to move forward

endlessly to work in exact

harmony chains of molecules

colliding in trembling music

if somebody truly wanted

to I would be very easy to kill

 

 

Glenn Shaheen is the author of the poetry collection Predatory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and the flash fiction chapbook Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013). Individual pieces have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

​In relationships, how do we manage our multiple selves? Can we truly be the same person alone and with others? The Green Condition, by Elizabeth J. Colen, explores the notion of the self.

Part collage, part lyric essay, and part animal invocation, Colen traverses different spheres: Roman history, the domestic space, poetic space, academia, loneliness, solitude, a complicated relationship and the environment of the Pacific Northwest; and she writes about how physical spaces change us, make us take notice and listen.

In these physical spaces the narrator is settled and unsettling: “I didn’t want to move here” and “I didn’t want to move here, but I’m growing to like it: the water, the planes, the neighbors even. The unexpected quiet.”

As the relationship begins to unravel, the narrator becomes more entwined with the physical world: “That week the spring tides: the water recedes far into the bay and the mudflats shine until just before dawn.”
In solitude, the narrator’s loneliness is palpable. However, Colen balances mundane tasks like: taking out the garbage, walking the dog, or visiting a coffee shop with the language of facts and observations: “When the sun is out, I stand in the yard. The dog sniffs a pile of droppings” and “Rome’s population grew from convicts and runaways, people who couldn’t be anywhere else.” What results are a series of deconstructed prose vignettes that requires readers to create and form their own meaning.

Lastly, if this book had a mascot, it would be the raccoon. The raccoon haunts the beginning of the book, a ghost animal scouring the trash. The raccoon makes an appearance toward the end of the book: “Just for a second I see white fur on the ears, white fur around its nose, its robber baron mask, greyblack body, striped tail.” Later, the raccoon dies, as does the relationship: “There is a raccoon dead in the alley, blood around its mouth. Is this what I wished for. I call animal control. They say they will send someone out. / When I peek out the gate an hour later; the animal is gone.”

The Green Condition, Elizabeth J. Colen
Ricochet Editions, 2013
69 pages
Retail: $15

 

 

was born in India and has since lived on three continents. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press). Her poems have appeared in J Journal, PANK, Southern Women’s Review and elsewhere. She holds a M.F.A from The New School and is the recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and Binder Conference Scholarship. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Susan Deer Cloud is a mixed-lineage mountain Indian from the Catskill Mountains. An alumna of Binghamton University (B.A. & M.A.) and Goddard College (MFA), she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, two New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Chenango County Council for the Arts Individual Artist Grant. Published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, her most recent books are Hunger Moon, Fox Mountain, Braiding Starlight, Car Stealer and The Last Ceremony. Deer Cloud is the editor of ongoing Native anthology I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool) and the Re-Matriation Chapbook Series of Indigenous Poetry (FootHills Publishing).