where I went while you were dying

 

this poem is                                                                                (about when your mother

collapses in front of you)

the emergency plan you don’t have when the emergency

comes.

not knowing your mother’s or sister’s or sister’s

blood type.

medications.

history.

is                                                                                  (about your mother

telling you she is dying and then       ____________)

in lieu of health insurance.

anxiety over social worker called

height weight charts. or

is                                                                                        (what your mother’s

face looked like without oxygen)

the story of your mother saving your newborn life. or

waiting to find out if you’ve returned the favor.

 

this poem                                                                                     (is about prying your

mother’s teeth apart)

wonders whether you did all you could to return the favor.

says it will let you know. whether you did.

enough.

 

this poem is                                                              (this is not a poem. about her saying

she was dying)

hope that grinds you down.

neither here nor there.

cannot remain present.

not a gift.

will not firm no or yes.

passes hours without blinking its eyes.

without waking up.

does not know how to leave.

a horrible bedside manner.

cold hands and bad breath.

 

this poem is                                                                                (this is not a poem. about her pitching into your      arms and _________)

 

the stuff your mother is made of.

nothing you recognize.

what’s under skin deep.

 

 

 

an octopus escapes the fishing net: in which my daughter becomes cephalopod

 

in this life, where you must be both

predator and delicacy, rend

for yourself the tenderest bits.

 

enter a world, daughter

where you may drink brine and not be

pickled;

 

lose remorse in the hunt for that which feeds

you. be sure

there are eight passions

for each arm’s embrace,

in case your dreams are injured

or cut short.

 

by all means, keep yourself

whole, even as you adapt with grace,

 

honey love. my

sinuous structure

pure musculature                               and give;

 

infinite flex and reshaping, do not

be confined to any that would contain you.

 

be gentle relentless

manipulation; hang on, love,

or disappear       in the confusion of your melanin

 

clouding the display; how they love

to watch you squirm                        and ooze;

be not object

entertainment,                                      remember how

to pry open exits                                 remember

camouflage.

 

learn both lurk                   and listen;

eyes open to color of danger

of safety

 

do not forget that tucked up

in the unfurling of your

pretty petticoat                                   of a body:

 

you are thought

and plot. beak

and brain. predator

and delicacy.                         Feed.

 

 

 

your nephew gives your daughter a toy gun for her birthday 

and you imagine retaliation

you imagine riddled;

you gift her a story of dead brown skin

and the child who once inhabited it:

 

your nephew, pale and safe,

is worried; says the story

of the dead brown thing is scary

how the cop just ________

how the kid just ________.

your daughter agrees, refuses to play

even inside, even where she is _____.

 

you realize maturation means presents

come with an edge, sharp or

bitter. she’s big now. it’s time to watch

out for giggles ridden with gunshots.

 

 

An award-winning writer and performer, Amber Flame is also a singer for multiple musical projects. Flame’s original work is published and recorded in many diverse arenas, including Def Jam Poetry, Winter Tangerine, The Dialogist, Split This Rock, Jack Straw, Black Heart Magazine, and forthcoming from Sundress Publications, Redivider and more. Her one-woman play, Hands Above the Covers: Hairy Palms & Other Nightmares of a Church Kid, was mounted under the auspices of a CityArtist grant through the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Since moving to the Bay Area, Flame works as a teaching artist and runs the Oakland Slam as slammaster. while performing daily feats of Black girl magic. She performs regularly on musical, literary, and cabaret stages, and works as an activist and organizer for a diverse number of queer and POC communities. Amber Flame is one magic trick away from growing her unicorn horn.

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s second poet is Amber Flame. 

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Amber Flame: It is necessary for me to create – I literally can’t help it, even if I gave up on putting it out in the world. I am compelled by everything; visual art, dance, music, as well as all kinds of writing, primarily for my own happiness. I always did write poetry, was drawn to writing creatively from an early age. I think now I am comfortable writing poetry because I can complete a piece in one sitting, which is harder to do with longer forms. So, I guess the biggest motivation for being a poet right now is being a single working mother who needs to write and having limited time to focus.

I am incredibly lucky in terms of the poebiz landscape! For the first time last year I made a commitment to submit my work for publication, and I am still reaping wonderful benefits. I haven’t actually worked on navigation with intent; my goal was simply to discover whether my poems could be successful on the page. The more I immerse myself in the literary world, the more motivated I am to better myself as a writer – always looking to up my level!

 

FFF: What are your influences – creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

AF: My fortune is that I have somehow surrounded myself with creative people in all mediums. My friends and peers are artists and creators – giving me a motherlode of inspiration. Mixed in with that is the fact that I’m an avid reader and a trained musician, and the list of influences is too long. I am drawn to those who want connection most, drawn to the outsiders, to those who analyze the experiences they go through and make beautiful things from that analysis. That is what I am forever doing – I am a Black queer mother in the United States who was raised fundamentalist Christian by white people, and I’ve practiced Buddhism for over 15 years – there’s a lot to analyze!

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems – as author and as reader?

AF: I love the things that make me gasp, make me think or wonder, make me jealous – where I wish I had written that, or had thought of that trick or perspective first. It is a very rare book of poems that can keep me all the way through, but the ones that do have just enough story and mystery to make me invest in the characters. Throughline is important. I want people to read my work and sigh, breathe “yes” or “damn” or to cry or feel a gut punch or laugh out loud. I want to break through their barriers or reserve and get under their skin. As for my aesthetic, I seek to be a wordsmith, a clever craftswoman. I want every word to be specifically chosen and elegantly placed. I value that in other art. Like when I find myself enjoying a Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift song because the hook is just so damn good, and it got me despite myself!

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something – an experience, a piece of art, anything really – that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

AF: I cannot avoid mentioning the loss I’ve experienced. I lost my mother earlier this year – she was too young and it was completely unexpected. I was with her when she collapsed and I still don’t know all the ways I am being shaped by the loss of her. She was one of my best friends, almost daily companion. The greatest grief of my life does influence every piece of art I make, of course. But I am too deep in the process right now to analyze it with any objectivity. Then, this fall, I lost my chosen mentor – the two most influential female figures in my life are gone, I am a mother without a mother. I keep saying I am not old enough to be my own elder. What I do know is that I am absolutely determined to be my best self, if only to honor them and my daughter. It is learning how to hold joy and pain at the same time, how to go on when there is no other side to get to – I will never get to “mom” again. The heartache quite literally knocks me down some days. I hear it won’t ever get better but it will get easier – I’m not holding my breath. Just deciding to get up and live well anyway. It is almost always someone’s creation that drags me out from under this shadow – be it a funny meme or video, an engrossing Netflix series, a song…

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

AF: I love so many books! Christopher Moore’s Lamb definitely blew my mind, though. I’ve read the Bible many a time and he does such an exquisite job – it’s easy to believe it is a part of the original story and makes so much sense filling it in. Also, we all know how the Jesus story ends and I still hoped… cried when the cruxifiction happened – that is some powerful writing. I also really love Martin Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl series (this speaks to my less-than-discerning taste in fantasy, mystery and sci-fi fiction but is incredibly well written). As for poetry, Nayirrah Waheed’s Salt is more than anyone could ever ask for, makes me react in all the ways I seek to elicit from my readers as a poet myself.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

AF: Being an artist and finding some kind of joy and/or release in the creative process is a great privilege. More than ever before, I am conscious and truly appreciative of that fact. Surrounding myself with artists who are working on a higher level than I am, or in a medium I never tried before constantly pushes me to grow. That, and a consistent daily practice shape the reality of my artist life.

 

 An award-winning writer and performer, Amber Flame is also a singer for multiple musical projects. Flame’s original work is published and recorded in many diverse arenas, including Def Jam Poetry, Winter Tangerine, The Dialogist, Split This Rock, Jack Straw, Black Heart Magazine, and forthcoming from Sundress Publications, Redivider and more. Her one-woman play, Hands Above the Covers: Hairy Palms & Other Nightmares of a Church Kid, was mounted under the auspices of a CityArtist grant through the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Since moving to the Bay Area, Flame works as a teaching artist and runs the Oakland Slam as slammaster. while performing daily feats of Black girl magic. She performs regularly on musical, literary, and cabaret stages, and works as an activist and organizer for a diverse number of queer and POC communities. Amber Flame is one magic trick away from growing her unicorn horn.

Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: The Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: An Anthology of Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is founding EIC of .

Turtle Finds Himself Once Again Upon the Land

 

Turtle stands, claws digging dimples in the dirt,

wondering which direction to go. Everything is

possible in this new life granted by the Great Creator

in which he was able to relinquish the weight

of the Earth, suspend it from El Sol with clear celestial

ribbon of sewn-together star particles and neutrinos.

 

We’ve got to center it, Turtle had instructed, adjusting

the ribbon around the curls of light emanating,

endemic of El Sol’s brilliance. If the animals feel

the swing and tilt too much, the proliferation

of motion sickness will cover the roads in vomit,

making it impossible to travel between the 7 Wonders.

 

And it is not as though Turtle even truly wanted

to see the 7 Wonders, so much as he wanted

the opportunity to see them. Want begets want

and he knew if allowed to swell, the want would grow

toward desire and desire would point its knurled

 

finger toward a direction. This would be the path

Turtle would take. But when opened like a yard house

spigot, even desire can’t focus, so here Turtle found

himself standing, not sure where to go, his purpose

lifted, like the weight of seventy-five billion souls.

 

 

 

 

 

Turtle Wonders About Sex

 

Carrying the Earth on his back, Turtle

overheard the many sounds

of lust and longing. He felt the vibrations

of millions of beds and couches and cars,

tree branches and sand dunes rocking

to the rhythm of pleasure.

 

Never having the elasticity of neck

to crane and see, he spent the better part

of a millennium wondering how it worked,

whether it would be enjoyable enough

to risk the pain that seemed

so often to accompany it.

 

Turtle, though sore from the weight

of the Earth’s abundance, had never

bled and blood seemed a scary thing

and so he thought he might skip sex for now.

It caused rivers and rivers of blood

to flow and the smell of the iron

had always made Turtle’s stomach a bit queasy.

 

All in all, in whatever direction carnal knowledge lay,

he hoped to go the other way.

 

 

 

 

 

Turtle’s First Valentine’s Day

 

I’m slow glad you’re mine!

squalls in red letters above a rude

sketch of a turtle, head turned sideways,

one large eye ringed in white, staring

blindly from a heart-shaped box.

 

It’s filled with candy, the human says looking,

Turtle thinks, quite pleased with themself.

Using long, papery fingers

the human unwraps the plastic

and lifts the cardboard lid to reveal

small light and dark brown squares within.

 

In the millennium that Turtle held the earth

he often caught snatches of the sounds

of this day, a holiday, he admitted to himself,

he did not understand. Amongst crying,

he knew there were hearts

not at all like real hearts, and love

not at all like real love

where humans scrambled to tear

flowers from their deep-gripping roots,

drove too quickly in machines

that grumbled and spit fumes,

and drank fiery liquid

until the emptiness

of their gestures looked full.

 

On the Earth before it was Earth,

the animals of the land and the animals

of the sky and the animals of the water

had no such day reserved

as all revolutions of the moon and sun’s dance

were days to show love.

No one day need be reserved as there was no

separation, no distillation, no need

for reminders. All actions in kindness:

sharing of a leaf, licking of one’s face, playful

splashing in the water

were all understood as affection and all

affection was known to be real.

 

It was for this reason Turtle pitied

this strangely popular holiday, but still,

for the sake of the bright anxiety beginning

to brim in the human’s eyes the longer

Turtle sat motionless,

he rubbed his cool head along the human’s hand

and stuck his tongue out to touch

the brown square that had been set before him.

One lick. Then two.

Turtle’s head became delightfully woozy

with the rush of smooth sweetness lingering

in his mouth. This indeed,

Turtle thought, taking a full bite,

feeling his prehistoric teeth press into

the chocolate’s soft flesh,

may be worth celebration.

 

 

 

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the anthologies Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts and Political Punch: The Politics of Identity, as well as the journals North Dakota Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and The Boiler Journal, among others. Her debut full-length collection, Hands That Break & Scar, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. 

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Sarah A. Chavez. 

 

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Sarah Chavez: It’s funny, but I think a lot about what poetry does and how it has functioned in my life, but hardly ever why I ended up devoting myself to it. I did have other creative outlets: I played piano briefly and am fair at drawing; I even got within a class or two of an art minor with a focus in mixed media, and had a lovely professor encourage me to keep going with it, formally or not . . .

Sometimes I think what dictates the activities in my life – and to some extent, the people – is a sort of trial by fire or survival of the strongest, what’s left after the fall out. I love painting and drawing and collage, but those mediums are in some ways delicate, high maintenance. They require certain conditions, special spaces, a variety of instruments which can be costly: brushes, good pens and pencils, chalk, glues, epoxy, canvases. In comparison, poetry is like the working person’s art. All you need is something to write on and anything to write with. I used to write on the back of receipt paper while waiting to hear “order up” when I waited tables. I wrote in fifty cent notebooks between classes in college, and before that between chores when I lived at my mom’s. I’d take a pocket notebook out on ten minute cigarette breaks when I worked as an administrative assistant. Poetry (& writing in general) is portable and low tech, accessible. There’s a lot said about poetry being difficult and hard to understand, but ultimately, if someone gives a poem even cursory attention, whether or not they think they don’t “get it” overall, they will see an image, recognize a feeling, hear a pleasing set of sounds. Life, and our understanding of it, doesn’t happen in one linear comprehensive experience; it is snatches & moments. In that way I suppose poetry has always felt the most natural, it provides for me the best way to process and appreciate what I encounter in the world.

As for the poebiz landscape, I don’t know. It can be pretty rough, especially if you come from outside the literary/art/academic world. There’s so much insider knowledge no one tells you. I didn’t even try to publish a poem until I was getting ready to graduate with my MA, and I only did it then because I’d decided I might want to eventually apply to a terminal degree program and I found out you needed that sort of credential to be seriously considered. Once I started sending out my writing though, I realized it was a lot like other jobs: you just need to try, learn from experiences, & don’t stop; not if you think it’s what you want. Of course this is not to say sending out again and again after repeated rejections is easy, but when I look at the grossly low number of women, queer people, & people of color (this is true of other industries as well, such as academia), it becomes more than just personal desire for some perception of success. Navigating the poebiz and getting my work out into the world becomes about visibility and asserting the rights and talents of traditionally marginalized groups, about influencing the aesthetic of the literary landscape.

 

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

SC: A few things in particular I am influenced by are music, visual art, & oddly enough sociological theory. Music especially has been huge, not a specific singer, band, or style of music, but the feelings elicited. I’ll become obsessed with a band or singer and will listen to them over & over again until the mood has fully seeped in. That mood usually attaches to social and/or personal associations, and it’s those together that the writing comes from, like I’m trying to recreate the mood or feeling of the music through my writing. Similarly, with the visual art, the influence is about having feelings awakened. The sociological theory though, that helps me intellectually understand and translate the feelings, especially as they relate to other humans. I want to understand the context from which both positive and negative behaviors and choices come from, especially as it relates to ethnicity/race issues and social constructions of gender and sexuality.

 

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

SC: What I tend toward, both in what I write and want to read, is narrative and rooting in the physical. Language is about communication and communication, ultimately, is about connection. I want to use sensory details and the recognition and empowered engagement with our own bodies to aid in understanding. What makes art & literature meaningful to me is personal growth toward social harmony. I appreciate the skill & technique art for art’s sake takes, but at this stage in my life, I’d rather have visceral connection than marvel at solely intellectual endeavors. I want to see & touch things. I want to encounter something outside myself, but told to me in such a way that I feel it through my bones and blood. I think in many ways this is most challenging. It takes skilled craft and hard work to create that kind of situation, while maintaining the feeling of being organic. I want art & literature to work, to earn its keep, have a purpose outside itself.

 

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

SC: I can’t remember if I’ve told this story before, but when I was around 13, my friend’s mom stole a notebook filled with poems my friend and I had written together, set them on fire, and tried to have me arrested.

This friend of mine and I started writing limericks after my maternal grandfather gave me an Ogden Nash book. As is a convention of the genre, though the book contained many limericks that were cute and harmless, there were also many that were crude and, let’s just say, “inappropriate;” of course our favorites were the bawdy ones. My friend and I both had difficult home lives, but hers was particularly bad and we disliked her mother quite a bit. So whenever her mom would commit some new sort of terrible (or just the same old terrible all over again), we’d write mean limericks about her. The poems were often making fun of her appearance, or how she smelled. They sometimes focused on how pathetic we thought she and this guy she was dating were. We wrote them all down in a standard college-ruled, red-covered, spiral notebook that I kept with me all the time. And it wasn’t just filled with our limericks, but also some of my deepest young teenager thoughts, feelings, and fears.

One day my friend and I decided to take the bus somewhere, or maybe we walked to 7-Eleven, I don’t remember which. Either way, we knew we’d wouldn’t be gone for too long, so I just left the notebook on the dining room table. When we returned, we didn’t expect anyone to be there, because her mom often left in the late morning and didn’t come back until after dark (if she came back at all). The mobile homes we lived in had stilted side porches that went half the length of the structure, so when we turned to go up the steps, at first all we saw was smoke and the back of her mom’s house dress. As we went up the stairs, she turned to look at us, revealing the notebook smoldering in the pit of their Webster grill. I don’t remember what she said, but it was definitely screaming and something about how could we and we were terrible people and I was a bad influence and she never wanted to look at our faces again. She commanded I leave her property, but I said I wouldn’t leave without the remains of the notebook. She said if I didn’t leave she would call the police and say I was trespassing, I said “good, call them.” I was going to charge her with destruction of property.

One of the things that has stuck with me all these years and helped shape my understanding and relationship with art was the realization that writing caused that out of control situation (and it did get more out of control). Part of my friend’s mom’s yelling and crying was quoting some of the lines from the limericks back to us so we could hear how cruel they were. It occurred to me later that even though those dumb limericks were just born out of the imagination of two teenagers messing around, those poems were powerful. They evoked rage and pain and humiliation. We certainly never intended for her to see them, but it was more a fear of half-hearted grounding than anything else. It never crossed our minds that what we said and wrote could truly, fundamentally affect someone else. Since then, I’ve never forgotten the potential power encased in a poem. Even though reading was always a source of comfort for me, it was that experience that made me think maybe I could not just consume the words, but write them too. If I could be so affected by what I read, and my friend’s mom could be so affected by reading what we wrote, there seemed to be limitless possibility (and power) in poetry.

 

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

SC: Argh, this is such a difficult question! There are so so many . . . If I have to pick one or two, and I stick to poetry because this is a poetry blog, and I don’t feel comfortable picking something more contemporary because I have thought about them less, then in my current state of mind, taking into consideration multifaceted awesomeness, then the two that have come to me first are Naomi Shihab Nye’s Words Under the Words: Selected Poems and Philip Levine’s What Work Is, and Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New. And I totally just cheated. Twice. It’s cheaty to pick selected works, and I totally gave three titles instead of two. Anyhow, one of the characteristics that make these books so mind-blowingly awesome is their shared ability to accessibly discuss difficult emotions and social concepts while tightly controlling craft. Levine and Nye have both been criticized for being too plain-spoken. This is silly though, because why exactly is the striped down word or image “plain?” Precision is a talent and if someone can be precise, clear, and emotionally resonant . . . shit. Sometimes the best way to communicate about the things that are most difficult is to strip them down to the physicality of the experience. And while Rich doesn’t often have that criticism leveled at her work, she is also able to create sensory worlds in her poems that can set the body on fire. It’s a good fire, the kind that makes you feel more alive, makes you want to be a better person. I guess ultimately, that’s what these books have in common and why everyone should read them: you walk away from the poems wanting to be a better human to other humans.

 

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

SC: Not that I can think of. I thought the provided questions were wonderful and I deeply appreciate the invitation to think more about these topics and to share my thoughts with you.

FFF: Thanks so much for participating in this series, Sarah!

 

 
Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the anthologies Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts and Political Punch: The Politics of Identity, as well as the journals North Dakota Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and The Boiler Journal, among others. Her debut full-length collection, Hands That Break & Scar, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. 

 

Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: The Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: An Anthology of Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is founding EIC of .

She collects pieces, forms whole body slowly

 

In Movement No.1: Trains, by Hope Wabuke, (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) an abundance of unexpected, organic relationships power through this chapbook, transmitting energy between humans and people, sound, color, and movement. Like the line referenced in the title above, there are many bodies at play in this collection. The train is a body, and the people, parts, stored inside.

Using fluid language and an almost dream-like tone, Wabuke gives us glimpses of humanity’s core like spying on a commuting passenger through the windows of a subway car: intense yet indirect, witnessing a presence briefly. It’s how Wabuke wants us to see: life like “tiny match stick toys.”

The word “movement” in the title illustrates a dual meaning: physical movement and orchestral movements, the actual text caters to the ebb and flow of daily life while also illustrating the navigation through an urban jungle. The energy never stops.

Wabuke begins her first poem in mid-sentence— we are moving already—and the train is alive in all of its magnificent silver glory. We have all waited for a train but Wabuke’s writing anticipates an animal coming around the corner:

 

“…and when she waits, knowing its coming by the movement of light

across rusted metal, the dirty white tiles of tunnel wall almost

beautiful in the light sliding closer through darkness…she imagines the sound she hears is breathing.”

Like a mystical living force the train gives birth to shadow and light. Turning corners unseen, making noise, consuming space. We read these poems as blurry–eyed infants seeking out black and white shapes, alternately lulled and startled by Wabuke’s insightful words and descriptions.

Metal is a wonderful detail that ties people together in this book. Who is holding the metal poles, who lets go of them to fall into each other as the train lurches ahead, who holds steady. The metal is a lifeline for all of the riders, forced to hold on and mesh their limbs into places that don’t mesh. There is other frenetic pops of color as well. The colors Wabuke uses are very specific: grey, (grey water, grey bridges, grey sky,) but also a relieving blue ink sky, a yellow moon piercing the night, and popping red seats are beacons of light and reprieve amongst the train’s cacophony.

 

“sometimes when she sits on the red plastic chair that is one among

many alternating rows of yellow and red seats bolted to the inside

walls of the train, she is not used to so much space below her…shifting

slightly against molded plastic shape that does not fit her form.”

 

It is through this image, trying to curve one’s body into a tiny plastic chair, that we meet “him.” He is mostly described in the past tense already, almost as soon as we meet him, he is gone.

At one time he used to bump arms against the girl in the poems, but no longer. We get the sense of “him” and time, whooshing by. He is there one second, gone the next, like a missed train.

 

“…he would hold her hand then, first pressing two fingers tight

to circle her wrist marking the point of meeting until, releasing, he

would hold the two fingers up to his eye, laugh and call her tiny…”

 

And then later:

 

“and on the day after his leaving. she notices his absence in the

awkward stillness of her legs, the way her arms hang stiffly at her

sides…”

His presence is secondary to the action of the train, the girl, and the crowds. The masses are always moving: dancing on the platform while waiting for the train to a hypnotic drum beat, hands waving above heads, eyes in heads looking up for rain. All of the senses blur together magnificently where one can never escape noise or people. This could be any city.

Wabuke captures an ethereal stillness amongst such noise and music. People sway and look and touch and never stop but it is beautiful. The masses moving and stopping is similar to an orchestral swell or street performer ten minute act. She writes:

 

“…he would touch drumsticks to upside-down white buckets to make beats, she would

see sound touch tile in tunnel walls and touch heels to ground.

rocking upward in tiny motions, she would lift hands lightly; she

would move her body in tiny circles of his rhythm.”

 

These masses move and strive to find a rhythm and a place in the world that makes sense. As Wabuke so accurately describes: “the pressing of a shape into something else.” Strangers mingling can be unsettling, but Wabuke joins them, links us to a higher power. These poems are so spiritual despite describing and participating in a commute, which is often a source of stress for most people. Wabuke writes:

 

“…in this space without sound or light, she will remember how in the

sounding of first explorations they would move parts to form one

body. so she will stand, rise and press close to half-open window,

push frame to crawl out. the train, restarting.”

Wabuke’s words transport us out of the train, into the pouring rain, into the sky. The water invades the tunnels and platforms. This natural element is not supposed to exist down here along the cement with the rats, sprawling puddles on concrete, dripping its own drum sound. Yet here it is. It finds a way in through rivulets, the ceiling breaks open, people push with one big surge to get out, escape into daylight, reborn. The water is a relief.

No matter what walls and tunnels are built, the boundaries of silence, not making eye contact with someone five inches from your face on a train, human-ness finds a way, rushes to the next stop, runs to get to the exit first to breathe the fresh air.

In these poems, Wabuke deftly explores that transition form “I” to “you” to “us” and back again. Leaving the inside to step outside is tough, but she tells us the movement will happen, whether we like it or not.

 

 

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. Recent chapbooks are out or forthcoming from Grey Book Press, Dancing Girl Press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her first full length collection is forthcoming from Lucky Bastard Press. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Pith,  Right Hand Pointing, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review and decomP. Visit: .

 

 

 

NO ONE ASKS

No one asks where you’ve come from,
what shimmering constellation of bones
and fear hold you together,
or what you’re trying to hold quiet
in your tongue. No one asks if you’re sick
of living like a flower in your mother’s hair.
No one asks if you ever watch your death
coming, like light that’s supposed
to have traveled here to your room
from such a great distance. No one asks
when you tired of desire and getting
inside another woman’s skin, unfurling
your fingers in hers to touch her neck.
No one asks if you’ve thought about
grabbing the braid of the woman
next to you on the train, and cutting it
off, what it would feel like to unleash
her. No one asks when you stopped
being afraid of your drunk father breaking
your records. No one asks what’s burning
underneath your lungs, what you’ve
buried there under dirt, because it’s so
quiet now, even you sometimes forget
its flare. No one asks when it will
kill you.

 

 

 

 

WEARING A DEAD WOMAN’S HAIR

 

I bought part of you. Funny how your hair’s spidery
roots braided and knotted are stronger than your place

here on earth. Hair like smoke around my wrist.
Yet, there was some brilliance around your skull.
The kettle’s caterwaul, you whistling for a black horse
to escape. This impermanence is one sip of salt

water at a time, unknotting what’s meant to survive.
I’m a woman who’s not ashamed to die. Wild in your eyes,

said the man I married. I learned to say husband—held

its strangeness in my mouth, bit its bridle that tamed me
into lowering my head, mare walking in mist, spine a slow
twist. This is why I wanted to become a sky inside of you.
Because we die. Witch-flowered girl born with a caul,
I’m still here. I stuck myself with pins—we fear we won’t

ever be again. You recited the names of saints. Or maybe
we’re afraid we will survive. You once refused his hand
in marriage. Your body hinged like a door. The children
of God last forever, the minister said. Air through a reed.

I’ve found you, named your gathering, cowbells, bag
of seed pearls, so perform the miracle of unhexing
this hair. I move among felled beasts. Yellow eyes close.
Hiss of foliage outside. It’s time to crawl out of my body.
I’m tired of singing one last bar with the harmonium—
your voice’s creation myth, wander in me, a midnight

bell in a terrible field. There’s no time to put myself
back together in this snow season: Undressed,
I follow your tiny hoof marks till they disappear.

 

 

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s second poet is Nicole Rollender. 

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Nicole Rollender: Probably like many writers, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t tell stories or write stories. When I was a teenager, I really zeroed in on writing poetry, after buying an 1880s volume of Tennyson’s poetry in a used bookstore. I carried the tome (it had a green cover with flowers on it, and was ragged at the seams) around with me, and practically memorized “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Two Voices”—I’d recite the stanzas to myself over and over. The poetic form always felt the most familiar to me—so is being a poet predetermined by our genetics or something else?

After I finished my MFA program and went out into the wider world, it was a different landscape than it is now. Barely anything was online. If you wanted to submit to a journal, you went to your local library, hoping they had a copy of the journal for you to read. Then, everything was also snail mail submissions. I know that’s dating me a bit, but around 2012, when I really came back to the idea of submitting (I had pretty much just been writing alone, not really interacting with the community at large), everything was different. Meaning that most print journals had websites and a presence on social media, there were many, many more online journals so you could actually read other poets’ work from your smartphone, and most importantly, you could connect with so many other poets via social media.

For someone like me, a by-night poet with a full-time day magazine editor job, two small children and an extremely limited ability to travel, I was able to start cultivating a life in the poetry community—reading others’ work, submitting my own work, volunteering my time to presses and journals, and workshopping with other writers. Like most poets/artists, I create work that I want to share with readers, so because there’s now a cyber-element to the poetry world, I’ve been able to put chapbooks and my first full-length collection out there. I want to keep writing, interacting, reading and sharing my work. I don’t ever see an end to it.

I read this excellent quote from Claudia Rankine on Facebook the other day: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.” That’s where my poetry is rooted—in my body, in my body’s past, in my mother’s body, my grandmother’s, my children’s bodies. I write from my body, and perhaps that gives my poems a neo-confessional feel because they come from so highly personal a starting point even as they spin out into other people’s lives, and other events and topics. There’s also a very otherworldly/mystical element to my poems because I come from two grandmothers who saw spirits, and passed the ability to see down to me: I’m very aware of my body’s mortality and of the thin line between this life/ afterlife. The idea of the female body being a conduit for the living (babies) and also the dead (who go and in out of me at will) figures heavily in my poems for this reason.

FFF: What are your influences – creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

NR:

1.  Religious iconography, medieval statuary, tomb effigies, saints’ relics and reliquaries

2. Poetry by mothers, especially Adrienne Rich, Julianna Baggott, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Traci Brimhall, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Audre Lorde, Rachel Zucker, Louise Glück, Jennifer Givhan and Jessica Goodfellow
3. The acts of becoming pregnant twice, and birthing two children—watching my body unfold as creatrix, releasing new bodies into the world
4. Poets of light: Lucille Clifton, Anne Carson and Louise Glück (again on my inspiration list)
   3. Men’s poetry in the vein of Timothy Liu, Li-Young Lee, Mark Doty, Ocean Vuong, Peter LaBerge, and of course, Rilke, Vallejo and Neruda
5. Paintings by Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh; photography by Ansel Adams
   5. Music by Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Keith Whitley, Amanda Perez and Mary J. Blige. Gregorian chants.
6. What Audre Lorde said of the poems in her 1986 collection The Dead Behind Us: “Here are the words of some of the women I have been, am being still, will come to be.”

 

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems – as author and as reader?

NR: I’m an image-based poet who writes loose narratives by leaping images, scenes, vignettes. I gather the detritus around me, the grotesque and the gorgeous. I want my work (and I suppose also the work I read) to:

• scream. It’s probably like the overly passionate lover singing below your window. It’s intense. Like Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and … all forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences.” My poetry is a love potion (poison).
• be beautiful and arresting. I want it to make a reader feel discombobulated and coming apart, and then coming back together again.
• stain. I want the images to stay with my readers for hours, days, weeks, maybe years, if I’m lucky. If I can ever come close to making people feel like the roof of the room they’re in when reading one of my poems just flew off, then I’ll have succeeded.
• haunt. The dead appear pretty frequently in my poems as they do in my personal life. I’m haunted and so are my poems.
• hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever written a funny poem. My poems come out of places that hurt or have caused scarring: What have I lost? But also, what has replaced what I’ve lost? There’s a story here in the poem—to get to some kind of resolution, there has to be conflict.
• reflect what it’s like to be a mother-writer. Because once another body forms in your uterus, everything becomes different, alien, unmoored. Your body is not just your body anymore—between writing lines of poetry—endless diapers and bottles, all those baby milestones, first words, first days of school, projectile vomiting and falls off the swing set. But also, the type of love that cracks you open and never lets you heal, the small hands in yours. How when you watch them as they run across the yard and you think, “They came forth from my body in a river and now they can live forever.”

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something – an experience, a piece of art, anything really – that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

NR: This is how it was: I never really thought about being a mother—or looked forward to it, or dreamed of it, or even longed for it. My husband and I were married for five years when we decided to see if we could have a child—and the next month I missed my period. The truth is, I was terrified out of my mind. I thought I had done everything wrong up until I peed on the stick—ate rare steak, went tanning, had a glass of wine. I was totally unprepared.

But then, I was more unprepared for the way the pregnancy unfolded: at 35 weeks, one of the ob/gyns in the practice I visited told me my stomach was measuring too small, and told me to go to the hospital immediately. While getting the ultrasound, the room was silent. A doctor came in and ran the wand over my stomach again, telling me that my baby was only 3 lbs., because I had an abrupted (half of it was decayed) placenta, and that the child hadn’t been getting the right levels of nutrition and oxygen—and that she would be very small (severe intrauterine growth restriction), might have brain damage and would definitely be spending time in the NICU. Despite hearing this—this baby had kicked me in the ribs so strongly for weeks—that in my gut I suspected that she’d be OK, but I wasn’t prepared for how traumatized I would be by the time she got home.

Because I had a placental aberration the doctors tested my daughter (and me) for all kinds of things, including a CMV virus (that if contracted during my pregnancy could render her deaf at around nine months) test that I didn’t get the results on for three weeks. After almost four weeks, my tiny daughter came home, and we learned that the doctors could find no reason for the abrupted placenta—including CMV. (And as it turned out I would have a history of defective placentas, and two children who had no side effects from their complicated births.)

During that time, it was painful to do so many things, including write. I finally wrote a poem called “Necessary Work” (you can read the poem ) that went through many drafts. I carried a sense that my body was broken, that it could not do the necessary things that would get a child here safely. The poem was rejected from several literary magazines, and then after another rewrite, I submitted it to Ruminate Magazine’s Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize – and as if in some bizarre twist of fate to me at the time, I won.

The judge, poet Li-Young Lee, chose my poem as the winner and wrote in part about it: “… Among the many virtues that recommend it are the vivid images, as well as a complicated music arising out of a deep unconscious word-counting and word-weighing. One can sense the poet sorting the music of thinking and feeling from the chaos of an outsized undifferentiated passion. But above all, it is the passion that I love about this poem, and how that passion is canalized by discipline to create a work of profound beauty.” And so, winning this contest galvanized me in a way that I hadn’t felt previously to believe that my work had value—that it could speak to others, that it could make them feel some deep emotion. This poem, in a way, saved me—and it’s still awe-striking to me when I read it and someone tears up, or someone I don’t know writes a blog that she taught the poem to her poetry class.

 

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

NR: Hands down, Audre Lorde’s Our Dead Behind Us. Like the poet, these spare poems are woman-warrior fierce and unapologetic. Lorde’s work focuses on difference – between groups of women but also of conflicts within the self: as Marilyn Hacker has written, “ … none of Lorde’s selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems.” Lorde’s work speaks to me especially because recently, I described the poems in my full-length collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (ELJ Publications, 2015), this way: The narrator in these poems is many: women who talk to the dead, women who mourn dead mothers and grandmothers, women suicides, women who’ve been raped/escaped rape, women who cradle premature babies, women who suffer depression, women who prepare the bodies of the dead, women who exist between their children’s bodily needs and saints’ incorruptible bodies. Lorde is many women within herself—her poems celebrate and confront those differences.

Also: Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s ridiculously amazing poetry book, Paper Doll Fetus (Perseus) is a collection of haunting poems about pregnancy and motherhood, and the history of obstetrics, from medieval midwives to early doctors who were pioneering the field. There’s an unusual cast of characters who speak in this collection, like a deformed ovarian cyst apologizing to the woman in which it grows, or a phantom pregnancy speaking to a nun who wanted a child. Since so much of my work does center on pregnancy and motherhood, themes that also figure in this manuscript, and the role this act of creation within the body plays for women in different time periods, I was happy to encounter this book now. I have a review posted on , if you want to learn more.

 

 

 

Nicole Rollender’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot and others. Her first full-length collection, Louder Than Everything You Love, was published by ELJ Publications in 2015. She’s the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio, 2015), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She has received poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine and Princemere Journal.

Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: The Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: An Anthology of Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is founding EIC of .

Christopher Gilbert – Turning into Dwelling

Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series 2015

Page Length: 187

Retail: $16

 

“Who is this Christopher Gilbert and why am I only just hearing about him?”

This is the question Terrance Hayes asks at the beginning of and throughout his Introduction to Turning into Dwelling, the collection most recently published by Graywolf’s Poetry Re/View Series. It’s a simple question with a few answers. Most of the answers, though, only produce more and larger questions.

The question, of course, is really two questions. The first is relatively easy to answer: Christopher Gilbert was a poet born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama, who then died in 2007 after a twenty-year battle with polycystic kidney disease. The only book he published during his lifetime was Across the Mutual Landscape, winner of the 1983 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. A student and then friend of Etheridge Knight, Gilbert was an active member of the American Poetry community through the late-70s and 80s, and received a number of distinctions for his work including an NEA Fellowship in 1986.

The second question, though, is probably impossible to answer. I only heard about him a couple months ago, and there’s a pretty good chance you’re hearing his name now for the first time. Why? Well, one answer to the question is that he only published one book during his lifetime. In the world of American Poetry, it is no small accomplishment to publish a book of poems, and this is especially true when that book wins a prestigious first book prize and attracts, over the years, a considerable following. Across the Mutual Landscape is as promising a debut as one could hope to find from an up-and-coming poet: a bit uneven, as first books are expected and allowed to be, but brilliant, fierce, extraordinarily intelligent, and, most importantly: wrought from an original voice packed with surprising turns of syntax, unexpected grammatical tinkering, and sharp diction stretched across the page in unique and strange constellations. Readers in the mid-80s would have been delighted with the collection and, I would imagine, anxiously anticipated Gilbert’s follow-up.

But this is where the story gets muddy, and the question of why we’d never heard of him until now becomes a bit sobering: for the remainder of his life (over twenty years) Gilbert never published another collection. Why not? Was Gilbert, like James Tate and Anthony Hecht, a bit overcome by the success of his first collection, which became something like a creative burden even as it initiated a rather promising professional trajectory? It seems plausible to me that if Christopher Gilbert had continued publishing books he would have been rendered ineligible for the extraordinary Graywolf Re/View Series that brings Turning into Dwelling back into the American Poetry mainstream.

The series, edited by Mark Doty, is four books into a noble and necessary mission to:

“Bring essential books of contemporary American poetry back into the light of print. Each volume—chosen by series editor Mark Doty—is introduced by a poet who comes to the work with a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series offers all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry to a new generation of readers.” (quoted from the Graywolf website)

Gilbert is hardly the only poet to have published a single, successful book of poems before receding into the backdrop of the poetry world. The Re/View Series is brilliantly conceived and urgently needed in an American Poetry landscape increasingly crowded by unknown up-and-comers. The multitude of voices we find in our current climate is not something to bemoan: far from it! Like other artistic forms adapting to the Internet age of inexpensive publication and decentralized avenues of promotion, American Poetry has never been more diverse in terms of whose voices get heard and how. Certainly this is something to celebrate. But it comes at a price: because the traditional “gate-keeper” roles have been radically undercut, we have more poets writing and publishing poems than ever before, which leaves the critic/reader with simply too many books to read with any reasonable degree of “authority” regarding what’s “out there.” Whether this was ever actually true or not, the perception is that, at one point in American literary history, a critic could cleanly distinguish the truly great from the rest, made possible only by that critic’s access to “the rest.” But today, “the rest” is astoundingly diverse and overwhelming in volume, and anyone who claims to have an adequate handle on the breadth of contemporary American poetry is frankly full of shit.

What makes the Graywolf Re/View Series so necessary is its response to this problem with an honest (if implied) admission: sometimes the great ones fall through the cracks. Though we tell ourselves that, with time, the cream rises to the top, the contemporary catalogue might suggest otherwise. Sometimes it takes tremendous effort to raise the cream to where it rightfully belongs: at the center of our attention.

Turning into Dwelling is an astounding book not just because of the story of its re-collection, but how it, page-by-page, sequences the DNA underlying the question of why we don’t yet know the name Christopher Gilbert. Turning into Dwelling is not one collection of poems, it is two: first, a re-issue of Across the Mutual Landscape; and then a previously unpublished manuscript compiled posthumously by Gilbert’s friends: Barbara Morin, Fran Quinn and Mary Fell. While the poems cannot ultimately answer the biographical question regarding Gilbert’s relative obscurity, they do provide a fascinating look into the mind of a poet whose aesthetic very clearly evolved after his initial publishing success.

Masterfully edited by Quinn and Fell, the second manuscript, Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation (Music of the Striving That Was There) is decidedly better than the first. To lean on a tired but too-perfect-to-pass-up metaphor: in the first book we see Gilbert mastering the scales of late-20^th century lyric poetry; in the second, Gilbert deconstructs those scales like Charlie Parker, the result of which is a poetic texture modeled on bebop, in which the melody is often presented and then turned inside out acrobatically with odd connective tissue and explosive unpredictability.

 

“That that that all day the vulture overhead was

screeching at in long resignation like naming

something not happened but always here

down here where dusk has begun covering

everything is even more a mystery,

even more a place whose passages deepening

lead to a way beyond testament tonight,

tonight after all day talking those small talk

things till talk was just a loud grasping

without any reaching, till what came forth

was the risk when the tongue goes random and

finally resorts to regarding the world as ‘whatever.’” (Getting Over There)

 

For Gilbert, the “melody” is generally a presentation of self. While some may lump his poetry into the increasingly vague category of “identity politics,” Gilbert’s take on the question of identity is highly intellectually engaged, specifically with the question of linguistic identity. When Gilbert essentially left American Poetry during the nineties and 2000s, he worked as a psychotherapist and a professor of psychology. This expertise is clearly present in Gilbert’s poems written during that time.

 

“Because it is the route that is the work

you could take the world itself to mean

yourself. Into these hills you’ve taken to

like the present, you could take place and be one

with the subject of your feeling arising

before you. The way the Queen’s lace sways

could be an indication of your breath

coming and going. As if an outline for time

itself, here I am stepping forth as an instance

walking the mountain road to the hilltop where

around the bend I’ll hear someone working

on the house the frame of whose part—the material

and the aesthetic and their perishing—linked

together will stand for history.” (Tourist)

 

Reading this poetry requires a diligent obedience to the unfolding syntax of complicated, systematic thought. It is highly, though not prohibitively, philosophical. The figures that arise from Gilbert’s late poems are neither neat syllogisms nor clean delineations of a unified self: they are self-interrogations, not merely of the author or the “speaker” of the poem, but of the very linguistic substance out of which selves are constructed. This linguistic self-consciousness is not only radiantly postmodern, but it fuses the language-as-object conviction of Objectivists like Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen with the communal, lyrical spirit of the black community first brought into the American mainstream by the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance and the countless schools and movements that have worked in their wake. It should come as no surprise, then, to find so much jazz in Gilbert’s line.

Music in this tradition is both a means of mourning and celebration; it unites individuals who have been outcast by society—people who are themselves a cluster of fragments. For Gilbert, music is the ultimate metaphor not only for the poetic project, but, perhaps more urgently: the human self, which is a cluster of chaoses out of which certain harmonies may arise. The song is self: an ephemeral container that can, through formal repetition and sheer emotive will, produce unity and transcendence. Perhaps the most uninhibited articulation of this music is the following, which concludes the second manuscript’s title poem, the scene of which is a hospital room after receiving a kidney transplant.

 

“The IV unit with my name and directions for my care

taped to the top will indicate I am. The ID bracelet

I’ve been wearing since I got here will say for me,

‘I am.’ The scar the surgeon left as a signature

on my belly’s right side will say, ‘I am.’ I am

I feel a gathering possibility passing from temporary

articulation to articulation the way the horizon

arises in the sun as a series of evident illuminations

while the earth spins clockwise toward futurity.

When the time comes I’ll rise and say, ‘I am.’

I’ll gather all my questions, step into their midst

and say, ‘I am.’ I am I am.” (Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation)

 

“Who is this Christopher Gilbert and why am I only just hearing about him?”

 

Christopher Gilbert is a breathtaking poet who, for reasons not entirely clear, most of us have never heard of. It seems that his genius was unappreciated during his lifetime, which is sad. Thank god for Terrance Hayes, Mark Doty, Graywolf Press, and the Re/View Series for bringing his work back into circulation. Thank god for Barbara Morin, Fran Quinn and Mary Fell, who recognized in Gilbert’s unpublished poems a singular poetics that lay obscurely dormant for far too long. In an increasingly crowded poetry world, it is tragically too common for a brilliant and original voice to go unheard. Thank god, in the case of Christopher Gilbert, at least, that voice is singing again.

LOTUS BLOSSOM REJECTS HER INTERMINABLE VIRGINITY

A lotus root is a wheel cut full of hollows, a buoyant vessel with rowed chambers like port windows, framing the faces of those too restless to die at home. The lotus claims no relation to the water lily, a stationary and easily drowned lookalike who never discovered the benefits of hydrophobic skin. Rather, the closest living relatives of the lotus are the sycamore family. They too grow to be hollow giants with monoecious flowers, capable of pleasuring themselves. When the lotus flower opens its sex, it does so slowly. After the long unfurling strip, the petals will curl again in the evening. On cool nights, the lotus flower generates its own heat, offering a warm cradle to any visiting beetle or bee. The lotus stamen soaked in tea recalls limbs tangled together in a shower, limp and slow and wise. She has done this blossoming before and will do it again. Even after the stasis that follows a root gashed and dried, the seed will germinate. What she will grow into no one knows. It has been thirteen hundred years since she last bloomed.

 

MISCEGENATION

When I kiss a bruise into the cleft of your collarbone, I think of the green bottle of hand sanitizer the stump grinding man in the lid of his toolbox. He massages his palms clean before touching his machine, and then they slow waltz together, his hand on her handle, the pump of his elbow guiding her spinning jaw. She is long, low and yellow, confident enough to trust her head to his grip, just as I trust my wrists to the rope in your hands. Back arched to the bed, I feel nothing like a lizard or dead bloom, both doomed to dull with the setting sun. My opening is not so much an opening as an implosion, the suction when a stump chipper laves her tongue across a hundred years of growth and a century splinters into seconds. I, too, swallow time, the bitter pooling at the back of my throat as I take your lip between my teeth. We are not so different she and I, voraciously in love, the pulse of the world thundering in our mouths.

 

 

 

REALIZING I’VE FORGOTTEN THE CHINESE CHARACTER FOR THOUGHT, AND BY EXTENSION MY GIVEN NAME

 

I don’t remember my own name.

I think I never learned it

was mine to claim,

but I don’t remember. My name

is family property, the grandparents came

to the birthing bed and declared it done.

I can’t remember my own name.

I think I never learned it.

 

 

Hear these poems aloud:

https://soundcloud.com/jasmine-an-3/miscegenation-jasmine-an

 

Jasmine An is a queer, third generation Chinese-American who comes from the Midwest. A recent graduate of Kalamazoo College, she has also lived in New York City and Chiang Mai, Thailand, studying poetry, urban development, and blacksmithing. Her chapbook, Naming the No-Name Woman, was selected as the winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in February 2016. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in HEArt Online, Stirring, Heavy Feather Review, and Southern Humanities Review. As of 2016, she can be found in Chiang Mai continuing her study of the Thai language.

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Jasmine An. 

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Jasmine An: I think that poetry fits my creative process because I am a slow thinker and not necessarily a visual one. Often times, I write poems to learn and to sift through my own thoughts. I won’t know the entirety of what I was attempting to say with a poem until I reach the often times surprising conclusion. There are other slow mediums in the world: oil paint, granite, gardening, but I trust my mind’s eye, and the readers minds’ eyes to interpret the sound of words into visual image if that is what is needed. I think I enjoy something of that ambiguity, the slowing of an extra layer of translation from language to ear or eye to imagination that poetry and other forms of writing necessitate.

As for the poebiz landscape: When I send poems out into the world, I hope that someone else can learn or feel something from the reading, just as I did from the writing. In order to write, and write urgently, I need to convince myself that I have something important to say. I think broadcasting and sharing is a crucial part of writing for me because believing my own thoughts are important enough to shape into a poem and send out is punching directly against the little self doubting thoughts, the haters, the sundry systematic and institutional forces that try to tell me my life and experiences aren’t worth voicing.

FFF: What are your influences – creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

JA: Recently, my influences, or you could say inspirations, are history and inheritance, haunting and ancestral ghosts. In particular, my first ever chapbook Naming the No-Name Woman, which is coming out this February, is a collection of poems that I wrote around the figure of Anna May Wong. Wong was the first Chinese-American Hollywood star. She began acting as a child in 1919 and continued to act in both the States and Europe until her death in 1961. She is fascinating to me. Her career was dogged by racism and anti-miscengenation laws that prevented her from receiving leading roles because it wouldn’t do for her to kiss a white male lead. The roles she was typecast into often represented the most basic stereotypes of Asian femininity (the erotic Dragon Lady, or the submissive Lotus Blossom). Yet, there she was, in Hollywood during the mid 1900s, acting in major films like no Chinese-American woman had done before.

In writing the poems of the chapbook, I focused on Wong as both a historical and a mythical figure. Her presence in Hollywood grew beyond her as an individual and, for good or ill, became the archetype of Asian American femininity in the national imagination. To write, I watched her films and was shaken by both the beauty and pain I saw in them. I read biographies and interviews, academic texts on racial formation and literary psychoanalysis, and researched symbolically loaded facts from the natural world (butterfly migration patterns, care tips for Chinese water dragons), and then brought all of these disparate facts together to triangulate my own voice and experiences.

My recent project of writing about/around Anna May Wong centers around the idea of inheritance, or the haunting way the past reaches out and touches the present. In a way, I consider myself haunted by Anna May Wong, and/or her legacy. I must wrestle with what I have inherited from her and I do so through my poems.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems – as author and as reader?

JA: I’m a poet who started out as a tween writing novels for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and then wrote short stories through high school and didn’t write a poem until college. I believe in the weird and the surreal and the seemingly arbitrary image that suddenly reveals itself as the perfect metaphor. I believe in the small things that become large, or the quiet that implodes into such an absence of sound your ears must stand up and take notice. But perhaps because of my beginnings in prose, I believe in narrative most of all. Whether I am reading or working on my own writing, I always look for narrative. It is the hook that keeps me with a poem while I read, or anchors me to a poem that I’m working on. The presence of narrative reminds me of why I’m writing, what I hope to learn, and how I will draw the reader along with me.

In my own writing, I also I strive to follow Stanley Kunitz’s advice to young poets when he says that they must  “polarize their contradictions.” In my poems, I embrace both the individual and the archetype, the “exotic” Chineseness and the 3rd generation Midwesternness that are both integral parts of myself and my work. These are my contradictions. Adhering to a strong sense of narrative allows me greater freedom to play with the paradoxical and the bizarre. Five legged frogs, my childhood memories on 9/11 and a horse with a broken hip can all exist in the same poem if there is a strong enough narrative backbone to hold them together.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something – an experience, a piece of art, anything really – that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

JA: I think really the only possible thing I can talk about here is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. I’m born in the year of the Monkey and ever since I was little both of my grandmas were telling me the story of the Monkey King. Sun Wukong is actually a character in a T’ang dynasty epic Journey To The West written by Wu Cheng-en. Journey To The West is a long and moralistic tale about a band of misfits seeking redemption by guiding a priest to retrieve the holy scriptures of Buddhism. However, when my grandmas told me the story, the storyline never really focused on Monkey’s journey to the west, but rather on his youthful exploits before that killjoy priest showed up. In my childhood, Monkey was less a priest’s companion than a trickster, a monkey god with fantastical magical powers who ate the peaches of immortality and overthrew heaven before losing a bet with the Buddha and being imprisoned underneath a mountain for five hundred years.

In undergrad, Monkey King returned to my life with a vengeance. As I was trying to figure out a single topic I could write about for ten weeks straight during an Advanced Poetry workshop, Monkey suddenly struck me as the epitome of the “bad Asian.” Monkey is not quiet, he is not polite, he does not sit still, he is nobody’s model minority. He is brash and loud and arrogant and demands to be recognized. What if, I thought, I wrote poems that placed Monkey in the Midwest? What if I was Monkey? What if I wasn’t Monkey? What if Monkey was here? That chapbook length series of poems, christened Monkey Was Here, after the scene where Monkey pees on Buddha’s hand and writes his name on the base of one of Buddha’s fingers, marks a turning point, I think, in my own writing. Writing to and through Monkey lit something in my poetry, a brashness of my own, and a desire to craft my own mythology of Midwestern Chinese-Americanness and then scrawl it across the bones of this place where I was born.

 

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

JA: Right now I am absolutely in love with the chapbook Here I Go, Torching by Carlina Duan. The chapbook is the 2015 winner of the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and centers around “documenting ‘American girlhood’ and ultimately redefining it… What, and who, is an ‘American girl’?” Carlina is a dear, dear friend of mine dating back to our high school days and has continually been an inspiration to me as both a human and a writer. The poems in this collection are utterly fierce and snappy. They rely on short lines and popping language that is absolutely at odds with my own writing style but all the more inspiring to me because of that difference. I am so in awe of the enormity of feeling boiling from these poems. Stylistically, this work reminds me of a cross between Aracelis Girmay and Lucille Clifton. Thematically, all of these poems make me weep for the truth in them.

Perhaps the most surprising and delightful book I’ve stumbled across in the past year is The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. It is a children’s chapter book told from the viewpoint of a gorilla living in a roadside mall exhibit. This unexpected book contains more depth of feeling and more truth bombs than many books of poetry. Ivan is a generous and heartfelt narrator. The prose is simple, yet all the more compelling for that simplicity. Secretly, this book is a better illustration of the transformation from apathy to social justice warrior than any soapbox essay or video clip. But at its heart, this is a story about a gorilla who comes to love a baby elephant and is determined to make her world better. I listened to the majority of this book on CD while driving across the Midwest as long as it was playing I wished I could drive forever.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

JA: I don’t think so! These were great questions, Fox, and I learned a lot about my own process while answering them! Thank you for that!

FFF: Thanks for participating in our series, Jasmine!

 

Jasmine An is a queer, third generation Chinese-American who comes from the Midwest. A recent graduate of Kalamazoo College, she has also lived in New York City and Chiang Mai, Thailand, studying poetry, urban development, and blacksmithing. Her chapbook, Naming the No-Name Woman, was selected as the winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in February 2016. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in HEArt Online, Stirring, Heavy Feather Review, and Southern Humanities Review. As of 2016, she can be found in Chiang Mai continuing her study of the Thai language.

Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: The Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: An Anthology of Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is founding EIC of .

It’s Just that this Floor is Dirty. And I Can Never Say Anything

 

The Filaments of Heather (Sad Spell Press, 2015) reads like a tightly knit horror tale. These poems have no individual titles. The narrative arc centers around a girl: Heather. Like the above line indicates, Heather cannot keep the floor clean enough, but she also is steadily losing her voice.

Goodrich chooses to make “Heather” the speaker in the poems. Since this is the author’s name as well, an immediate intimacy is created with the reader as we recognize Heather as author and Heather as metaphor in a new universe. (In this case, the universe is filled with dust and hair.) Trusting in her story, Goodrich can do whatever she likes with her Heather avatar. “Speaker” Heather loses her sanity to reclaim a sense of self.

We begin in a domestic box. Heather is barefoot, wears a frayed dress, and sweeps for three days straight. She wants to do little else. Our first glimpse into the speaker’s world: crumbs on the floor strung together “with strands of our hair,” onion coats, dried noodles, a bobby pin stuck to egg white, and outside “a chunk of heather cut the sky, making foothills hard to see.”

Heather is dismantled already— there is literally a chunk of her outside on the horizon while the other heather is inside enduring a tenuous stream of consciousness and cleaning a filthy house, or, her mind. Heather’s hands only reach for the broom stick. There is something meditative about this opening, with the repetitive motion of sweeping, but also foreboding. The act of housework is feminine and traditionally domestic but in Heather’s world, here are various quotes about her dress:

“My threadbare dress hits at the knees, and its fraying hem tickles my calves.”

 

“The frayed hem of my dress rips slightly, caught on nothing, but rips nonetheless.”

 

“Clumps of my dress fall off.”

It is almost as if Heather’s dress were alive. Not only is it a delicate symbol of her mental state, but it does not protect or shield her, as clothes are sometimes wont to do: it is slowly betraying her, leaving her more vulnerable to the elements and to outsiders’ judging eyes. Still, Heather sweeps meticulously.

What is Heather attempting to find? In the following poems, she clears away space to see:

“my broom uncovers my initials that I carved into the laminated tile with an exacto knife, as a child. The slits now thick with dirt and rust…And my failed time capsule containing my treasures: a puka shell necklace, Ken Griffey, Jr. cards, and a letter for future earthlings warning them about the dangers of plastic and potatoes. Sweep, sweep. sweep.”

Goodrich forms this surreal planet of discovering childhood mementos just by sweeping the floor. Heather says that all of her “gems” reappear, some right away, some take years. The reader goes along for the ride. What does she want to stay buried? Nothing, apparently. She uncovers the rotting carcass of a warbler (again we jump into this world— knowing she is sweeping inside, not the backyard.)It is an easy leap for the reader to make—we imagine Heather sweeping anywhere.

She sees the bird and weeps “again,” feeling it’s death for a second time. She conducts a second funeral. Then amusingly, but also creating tension, her mother appears, disgusted, and pulls her into the house by the wrist. Following this scene are two amazing and memorable lines:

“Mother said all little girls with big eyes have big tears and can’t see anything right,” and then—

 

“She said it’s not polite to handle dead things.”

Goodrich then turns our attention to Heather’s mind, or the unravelling of it. She thinks someone is following her, someone wants to “make her quiet” or “make her stop.” The only respite Heather receives is through sweeping. She sweeps a path, she feels her house breathe again, come alive, and she is its maker. There is wonderful symbolism of being “made” or unmade, like a bed. With cleaning, something that didn’t exist before is created. A room is new. Heather sweeps faster and faster, since something is catching up to her, maybe trying to unmake her, unmake her work. Her hair is dirty, longer now, bouncing off her elbows. She says her dress is too thread bare now, shows too much of her body.

 

“How is this bulging, boxy, protruding body mine?”

Goodrich touches on female body image in this collection as well: not recognizing shapes, hiding and shaping a body, hinting at cutting skin. Our bodies do not do what we want them to do. They are a shell. She clues us in:

 

“The house is beginning to smell like rotten meat.”

For all of the cleaning, Heather’s world is aging and decomposing. The frayed dress continues to dangle threads along her bare heels.

The mother’s return to the poems makes us leave Heather’s brain for a bit and returns us to the present with an immediacy. Goodrich writes:

“Mother said my crazy months were July and August. September. She said this when I closed the windows in every room of the house, despite the heat, to silence the crickets. The sound felt like staccato pin pricks and snapping chicken necks.”

Goodrich introduces Heather’s sensitivity to sound with such violent descriptive imagery, alluding to what’s coming down the pike. The crickets have a voice but Heather does not. Heather has “aphonia” which literally means “no voice,” or when outside circumstances damage the vocal chords or voice box.

(She cannot negate anything when her Mother or other people who come to the house want to open the windows because it is so hot they cannot breathe. She protests inwardly. During these visits with her Mother, who is a registered nurse, Heather finally confides in her.) Heather stops focusing on the crickets because there is a larger sound, a more deafening thud she is forced to hear: her heartbeat. Heather tells her mother her heartbeat has moved from her toe to her left ear and she cannot hear movies or pay attention during class. It is overwhelming and awful.

No one believes her so Heather stops talking about it, all the while dreaming that little ticks are hatching in her ear tube.

Heather goes to specialists. Clumps of her dress fall off. When she cannot sit quietly in her skin, she sweeps. She just craves silence. Heather says:

“That would mean I put the broom down. And I can’t yet.”

All of these themes, Heather not having a voice, talking to a Mother who does not listen, doctors not believing her about the shattering thumping sounds in her ear, pinpoints a lack of control, a lack of power. Heather confides in us, the reader:

“They don’t see. They don’t find a mess a mess. They don’t see a problem. When I scream, they say: Heather stop the drama.” It is heartbreaking.

On a deeper level, these poems are about female voice and power. How does one earn permission to be an authority, to inspire confidence in others, to be one’s own advocate? Heather wants to be seen, heard. She literally cannot speak about it.

Goodrich’s poems stomp all over each other like noisy plates balanced in the kitchen until they come crashing down to an effective yet shocking conclusion. I’m not going to give anything away with Heather’s powerful line here, at the end, but it is wonderful:

 

“But Mother, this is Evolution.”

This poem story is sparkling with a unique voice in Goodrich: gruesome and heartfelt. May we all cling to our sanity a little tighter and only clean once a week, or maybe not at all until ready, uncovering our gentle psyches one time capsule at a time.

 

 

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. Recent chapbooks are out or forthcoming from Grey Book Press, Dancing Girl Press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her first full length collection is forthcoming from Lucky Bastard Press. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Pith, Freezeray, So to Speak, Entropy, Right Hand Pointing, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review and decomP. Visit: .