Structure and Style

una oración (bruja’s soliloquy)

I arrived one body-part at a time.
First, the scalloped middle,

blue-roped torso. Eyes, nose & ears,
blood-licked. Then the blur of this electric mouth,

the wet unfolding of my arms, legs & fists.
The last, of course—this cauldron of a cunt.

The nurses delivered me to my parents
on a dinner plate. Father howled.

Mother thinned down to a milkless shadow.
I have always been a god-hammered girl.

Dirty as a turnip, I crawled into
the blind center of the earth

a worm built to outlast the swallow.
When I was young, I kissed the girls too hard,

riddled my tongue with a father’s profanity—
I thought this was how to become a boy.

Bent daughter of a six-fisted man,
I wanted the safety of a cock. Permission

to roar. Dumb as the moon, I knew
nothing of this body

other than the violence it ignited,
how my bones reeked of motor oil—

my every opening a socket to blacken
every thieving finger.

Who would ever choose to be
the damaged house?

Better to be the demolition gender.
Cinder block & dog-rotted

I strutted the world. Turned the mirrors
& swore off every version of myself.

It wasn’t until the third
time my body was taken

from me I learned how to love it.
Now I walk the streets

forcing men into uncomfortable eye
contact: You wanna fuck with me?

I wanna fuck with you.
What greater burden, what more

unconquerable revolt is there than that
of a resurrected woman?

Ripe with vengeance, I termite.
Tomorrow I’ll button my blouse

with a dozen kitchen knives &
cast your dreamless skulls

into the cemetery soil
& that’s just breakfast.

I own my blud. What you borrowed
I will come back for.

Scratch your name into a coffin nail,
bind it in hair & wax

an ungentle ceremony
for your ungentle hands.

O captive, my captive!
I have coined your suffering song,

have driven you back into your
hellish light.

Let the drilling of the worms
be your only sermon,

the wasting of your flesh
a salvaged psalm.

Listen: anything holy
is not reversible.

There isn’t a man alive
who could undo me.

—Rachel McKibbens, from blud (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)

A few months ago, I first started seeing Rachel McKibbens’ poems circulating among poetry twitter*, and I made a note to get blud, because each new line stunned me. But it wasn’t until a little over a week ago, when I was sitting at a keynote address for a conference, deep in my thoughts about how hard it was to concentrate, and what a ridiculous human being I was, and how embarrassing it is to feel deeply for another person, and how scared I was of my dissertation defense, and how scared I am of my student loans, that I really appreciated blud. I thought I might pass out or scream or do something, and I realized I was having a panic attack, so I went into an adjoining room and opened up blud and read this poem, this witchy goddess poem (for “bruja” means “witch” in Spanish). I read it again and again, pausing on specific lines (like the last couplet). And I felt powerful.

This poem is, in many ways, about taking the circumstances that you have been given–the things that seemingly make you weak–and embracing them, becoming ferocious. The speaker says, “I have always been a god-hammered girl.” (Think about that image. I can’t stop thinking about hammered jewelry, and how it is flattened and shaped into being.) She wanted “the safety of a cock.” She knew “nothing of this body / other than the violence it ignited.” And, she asks, “Who would ever choose to be / the damaged house?” Women are, literally, the things that are inhabited–in heterosexual relationships, by men; in childbirth, by babies. We are the place where others gather and dwell, the emotional house for your needs. I’ve been talking with friends lately about how I perform my gender as an instructor at my university, about how students come to my office hours and look for help–and it’s not just with their papers. I advise them not to get behind, to break their insurmountable tasks and papers into smaller tasks, to visit the campus counselors, to get regular sleep and healthy food, to think about medication if need be. And I don’t mind it, because that is who I am, and I feel for them. I struggled in college, often without much guidance. But this guidance is also a thing that seems to come naturally because I am a woman, and maybe that’s worth pondering.

Anyway, the speaker of the poem follows the line about the damaged house by saying, “Better to be the demolition gender.” I have some questions about this: Is that what men are? Is that what women could be? And is demolition by its very nature a negative thing? This line makes me pause every time I see it.

Anyway, the speaker becomes brave and aggressive after her body has been “taken” a third time (and I can only read violence into these lines). She writes, “Now I walk the streets // forcing men into uncomfortable eye / contact: You wanna fuck with me? // I wanna fuck with you.” I don’t know about you, but my initial response to these lines was cheering, followed by some confusion, for doesn’t this mean that she is acting aggressive, like a man? But no. The speaker rejects this binary of women as nurturers and men as aggressors. Women can both. (Men can be both.) She is merely taking up space in the world, as a man would, no longer avoiding eye contact or moving out of the way of an approaching man. (I’ve read that women are more likely to move out of the way than men, but I don’t have scientific studies at hand, so let’s call this anecdotal evidence. I move out of the way of things, especially men, coming at me.) And thus the speaker is reborn. “What greater burden, what more // unconquerable revolt is there than that / of a resurrected woman?” she asks. “Ripe with vengeance, I termite.” (I swear, that’s probably my favorite line.) She is ready to fight. By the end of the poem, she writes, “There isn’t a man alive / who could undo me.” That’s perfect.

I’ve been thinking about why this particular poem spoke to me so much during the keynote address. It’s not that I was mad that the keynote speaker was male. It’s not that all of my worries and concerns that led to my panic attack were gendered. And yet, as a person, I am always aware of my gender and the ways I perform it. This poem reminds me that to be a woman doesn’t mean just one thing, that it is an open-ended thing. (And witches are powerful.)

Happy National Poetry Month! Go read blud.

-R

*If you are on twitter and are not already following Kaveh Akbar, Paige Lewis, or Danez Smith, you’re missing out on the poems they post–on the daily.

Aubade with Burning City

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving
Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent
Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese
refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

Milkflower petals in the street
like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright…

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
Open, he says.
She opens.
Outside, a soldier spits out
his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones
fallen from the sky. May
all your Christmases be white
as the traffic guard unstraps his holster.

His fingers running the hem
of her white dress. A single candle.
Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, children
shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled
through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog
lies panting in the road. Its hind legs
crushed into the shine
of a white Christmas.

On the bed stand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard
for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police
facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
A palm-sized photo of his father soaking
beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.
A white…A white…I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

falling from her shoulders.

Snow scraping against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just
out of reach.

The city so white it is ready for ink.

The radio saying run run run.
Milkflower petals on a black dog
like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying
something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks
beneath them. The bed a field of ice.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first shell flashes
their faces, my brothers have won the war
and tomorrow…
The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming…
to hear sleigh bells in the snow…

In the square below: a nun, on fire,
runs silently toward her god—

Open, he says.
She opens.

–Ocean Vuong, from Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

If you have read Ocean Vuong’s 2016 collection of poems, you’d probably expect that I’d write about “Ode to Masturbation,” and believe me, it’s tempting. It’s a good poem and you know I like poems about the body (and its functions, particularly the sexual ones). But this poem, “Aubade with Burning City,” is what I have been thinking about, over and over, in the two years since I first read Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It is the poem that haunted me over Christmas–even though it is set in April–and it is the poem that wouldn’t let me quit writing about poems for Structure and Style. Not altogether.

Here’s a brief paragraph where I should offer my apologies for being away so long, but I don’t know that anything matters so much as the poems themselves and the words about them, when they appear. I’m sure you come here for poems, not personal stuff. What I’ll say is we’ve been busy. Since she’s been gone, S has gotten a collection of poems accepted by Sibling Rivalry Press (which will be out in 2019), and she has opened Brier Books, an independent bookstore in Lexington, KY, with Jay, who has written for us. I’ve been busy writing my memoir and publishing essays, and in a week and a day–god willing and the creek don’t rise–I’ll be defending my dissertation so you can call me Dr. Hazelwood. But I digress.

What I really like about this poem is its juxtaposition of happy American lives who listen to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” with “the first shell flashes” as Americans pulled out of South Vietnam. I say I like this, but I mean I am haunted by it. I’m haunted by the idea of snow and that white Christmas we say we dream of in the U.S., but in South Vietnam, it’s different: “Snow shredded / with gunfire. Red sky.” Such a happy song, full of longing for love and Christmas trees and eggnog, is the one the U.S. used as a code for evacuation. (Maybe you don’t like Christmas, maybe you think it’s too commercial or too lonely, and that’s fine, but you know how you’re supposed to feel about the holiday and the warm fuzzies that “White Christmas” is supposed to give you.) And in the end, after the song was broadcast and the U.S. evacuated the embassies and its people, the people of Saigon are left like the black dog who “lies panting in the road. Its hind legs / crushed into the shine / of a white Christmas.” This really happened (the song as a code name for the evacuation). Look it up.

I could write a lot more about all of the other haunting lines, but I’m out of practice. I think you should read the poem to yourself over and over, not concentrating on knowing exactly what’s happening in every line but trying to let it sink in anyway. Think of the poem, as Matthew Zapruder writes in the introduction to Why Poetry, as operating in “dream logic”: “its interest in the slipperiness and material qualities of language, its associative daydreaming movement–is not some deliberate obfuscation, or an obstacle to communication, but essential to the very way poetry makes meaning.” Think of the way the images expose the vast imperial machine that is America. Think of the legacy we’ve left behind. Read it again. And share it.

-R

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

–Frank O’Hara

I think I lost interest in poetry in part because I was so busy with classwork (taking and teaching classes as a PhD student) and in part because I tried to write it. In the fall of the second year of my PhD (I just finished my third year), I took a poetry workshop class, and I struggled. I realized that I wasn’t just reading poetry and commenting on it but trying to make it, to start with a blank page. The genre felt so foreign to me all of a sudden. I didn’t feel like I understood language anymore, and I certainly didn’t understand my own line breaks. The experience was very, very humbling.

By contrast, I have written creative nonfiction almost exclusively for more than ten years now. I still struggle at times; I thought about writing a teeth essay for over a year before I started it and then I wrote shitty first drafts for a year before I figured out what I was doing. But it usually always works out. Sometimes it even comes easily. So I always go back to creative nonfiction. I want to finish writing my memoir about the two (plus) years in which my life fell apart. (Perhaps you suspected this with some of the poems I was writing about on Structure and Style. I am really not such an enigma.)

But poetry hasn’t left me alone. I often come across poems that other people love or post or write about, and I look them up, and I think about them for days. This time, I was reading Durga Chew-Bose’s new essay collection, Too Much and Not the Mood, when I came upon her mention of how much she loves hearing Frank O’Hara read “Having a Coke with You,” “gleefully anticipating him saying yoghurt, saying flu-o-rescent orange tulips.” Suddenly, that’s the only poem I wanted to read, again and again.

Mostly, I love that this poem starts with some big names, some famous cities, and it mentions an enormously famous Modernist painting, Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”–but none of those things seem to matter to the speaker. Having a Coke with you is what matters–and it’s worth the title of the poem. The speaker focuses on the small moments and says, “it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still / as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it.” Those seem like the most important moments in the world. He remembers “in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth / between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles.” He would rather look at the “you” of the poem than “all the portraits in the world.” He wants the experience, not just the art. He wants real life. We could make an argument for low art versus high art here, but I don’t really care right now. I just want to live in the moments of O’Hara’s poem. I just want to tell someone how much I love this poem.

-R

LOOK

It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me.
Exquisite.

Whereas Well, if I were from your culture, living in this country,
said the man outside the 2004 Republican National
Convention, I would put up with that for this country;

Whereas I felt the need to clarify: You would put up with
TORTURE, you mean and he proclaimed: Yes;

Whereas what is your life;

Whereas years after they LOOK down from their jets
     and declare my mother’s Abadan block PROBABLY
     DESTROYED, we walked by the villas, the faces
     of buildings torn off into dioramas, and recorded it
     on a handheld camcorder;

Whereas it could take as long as 16 seconds between
     the trigger pulled in Las Vegas and the Hellfire missile
     landing in Mazar-e-Sharif, after which they will ask
     Did we hit a child? No. A dog. they will answer themselves;

Whereas the federal judge at the sentence hearing said
I want to make sure I pronounce the defendant’s name
correctly;

Whereas this lover would pronounce my name and call me
Exquisite and lay the floor lamp across the floor,
softening even the light;

Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat
     sensors were trained on me, they could read
     my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through
     the wardrobe;

Whereas you know we ran into like groups like mass executions.
     w/ hands tied behind their backs. and everybody shot
     in the head side by side. its not like seeing a dead body walking
     to the grocery store here. its not like that. its iraq you know
     its iraq. its kind like acceptable to see that there and not–it
     was kinda like seeing a dead dog or a dead cat lying–;

Whereas I thought if he would LOOK at my exquisite face
or my father’s, he would reconsider;

Whereas You mean I should be disappeared because of my family
name? and he answered Yes. That’s exactly what I mean,
adding that his wife helped draft the PATRIOT Act;

Whereas the federal judge wanted to be sure he was
     pronouncing the defendant’s name correctly and said he
     had read all the exhibits, which included the letter I
     wrote to cast the defendant in a loving light;

Whereas today we celebrate things like his transfer to a
detention center closer to home;

Whereas his son has moved across the country;

Whereas I made nothing happen;

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is
your life? It is even a THERMAL SHADOW, it appears
so little, and then vanishes from the screen;

Whereas I cannot control my own heat and it can take
as long as 16 seconds between the trigger, the Hellfire
missile, and A dog. they will answer themselves;

Whereas A dog. they will say: Now, therefore,

Let it matter what we call a thing.

Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds.

Let me LOOK at you.

Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.

–Solmaz Sharif, from LOOK (Graywolf, 2016)

I’m having trouble formulating a response to the two-day-old U.S. ban by executive order of anyone from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, which is where Solmaz Sharif’s parents are from. I’m having trouble responding with words, but I think that’s what this poem is about. So I’m diving in.

LOOK, the poem commands you–in all caps in the title, throughout the poem. Look here, don’t look away. Words matter in this poem. Words matter here, when they haven’t for some time. How else could you explain those words in italics in the tenth stanza, presumably words that the speaker has actually heard (or read) repeated about Iraq: “its not like seeing a dead body walking / to the grocery store here. / its not like that. its iraq you know / its iraq. it’s kinda like acceptable to see that there.” It’s acceptable to see dead bodies in Iraq but not here–here in the U.S.? here wherever we live?–because bodies don’t mean anything there, because we see them all the time. Right? Because it’s okay to say that. Because what do those bodies mean or matter? And what do words matter? It’s no big deal to say that about dead bodies in Iraq, to refuse to revere life. It’s Iraq. They’re bodies, not people. They’re words. Nothing matters.

Except they do. This poem reclaims those words, telling us they matter from the very first lines: “It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me. / Exquisite.” What does it mean to be called exquisite? I find myself looking up words from this poem, words I have known for decades of my life, like exquisite, just to make sure I am giving them the meaning and thought they deserve. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online says exquisite can mean “Sought out” or–“Of meat, drink, etc.”–“Carefully chosen; choice, dainty, delicious.” I guess a person is the “etc.” here–can a person be choice, dainty, or delicious? If the person is only to be consumed, not known. On down the list, we have “Carefully elaborated; brought to a high degree of perfection.” I think we’re getting closer here. The fifth meaning is “Of such consummate excellence, beauty, or perfection, as to excite intense delight or admiration.” All of these things imply the human, the speaker of the poem, is an object rather than a person to be known and loved.

It’s interesting that the first stanza of this poem positions the speaker as an object rather than a person, because that is how she is treated throughout the poem. She is an object from another “culture” who should “put up with that for this country”–according to a man at the 2004 Republican National Convention. What should she put up with? “TORTURE.” Instead of actual empathy, she’s given, what exactly? Proclamations? Excuses? Something that makes her seem less than a whole person with a whole life, culture, history, fears, loves. Instead of being treated as a person, a federal judge treats whoever being sentenced as a name to be pronounced correctly. Whoever is directing the missiles from Las Vegas treats persons not as individuals but targets: children, dogs. The speaker is not a person but a body whose heat rises with a “THERMAL SHADOW” detected by another faceless person. Near the end of the poem, the speaker writes, “For what is / your life? It is even a THERMAL SHADOW, it appears / so little, and then vanishes from the screen.” She writes, “I cannot control my own heat”–meaning she cannot control her own life. What is her life? Is it a life, if she cannot control it?

It’s interesting, too, that most of the stanzas here start with “Whereas.” The OED notes its third meaning is “Introducing a statement of fact in contrast or opposition to that expressed by the principal clause: While on the contrary; the fact on the other hand being that.” So these are statements of facts, which are supposed to be contrasted with each other, but in the end, they all add to up one meaning: We don’t treat every person as a person. We have, for all of history, been treating some groups like they don’t matter, like they aren’t persons–equal humans, just as human as us, their bodies laying on the ground just as loved as ones here in the U.S.–and all of our words about Iraq or anywhere that isn’t “America first” don’t matter.

But “Whereas” also means “A statement introduced by ‘whereas’; the preamble of a formal document.” So let this be our formal document. LOOK. Let words matter again. The speaker writes, “Let it matter what we call a thing.” And lastly, “Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.” LOOK. Look for longer than you have been looking.

-R

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

–Maggie Smith, from Waxwing

I’m having a little trouble connecting words right now. I’m having a little trouble trusting words that come after each other to make sense. All of my social media accounts are full of fear and anger and blame and shame, such extreme emotions to guide us. I have felt them all, though I have not fully cried since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. I started taking Prozac five days before the election, and on the first day of my anti-anxiety medication, I cried uncontrollably (really, for hours) because I thought a friend didn’t invite me to his birthday party. But when the fascist con man–who doesn’t pay his bills, has bragged about sexual assault on tape, has incited violence, and has made prejudiced, racist, sexist, and xenophobic comments (I’m leaving out a lot, but you get the picture)–was elected, I lost the ability to cry. I am numb and terrified and so very, very worried for everyone. I think this is shock.

So I am returning to poetry, that love of mine that I never should’ve left, not in lieu of activism like signing up to call others for the Louisiana U.S. Senate run-off election on December 10 or donating to good causes (the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Planned Parenthood) or standing with all of my friends who are in danger or trying very hard to teach my students to think critically. I am returning to poetry in addition to my other work because it helps me make sense of the world. I am returning to this poem (which has gone viral) and its repetition, thinking about the things that need to be said at least twice to sink in. This place could be beautiful. You could make this place beautiful. Yes, you. Whenever you’re ready, however you do it, with whatever emotion you have (yes, anger). It’s a real shithole right now, but you could make this place beautiful. This place could be beautiful.

-R

I Would Rather Be Gay Than Straight Any Day (& Other Things I Think But Never Say)

after Aaron Smith

What I hate most is the I’m-sorry face
when I tell some well-meaning, left-leaning
acquaintance that I’m a queer.

Of course I don’t say it quite that way.

I say softly, and with my signature smile:
“My partner and I have been together
for almost eleven years.”

Translation: I love someone. In case it concerns
you, I am capable of committed love, too.

Notice how I sashay away from the coming-out
spiel, how I hold the word sex deliberately at bay.

Even the phrase “same-sex couple” might put us all
uncomfortably in mind of naked bodies, spin the wheel
of hetero-wonder a little too hard,

thinking who does what to whom?

These new associates don’t realize they are making an I’m-sorry face.
They confuse it with the I-empathize-with-the-challenges-I’m-sure-
you-have-had-to-face face.

They nod and lean in a little closer, to show they
are not afraid. Like expert ventriloquists, they’ll transmit
I’m sorry without ever moving their lips.

Translation: I know you don’t have a choice about this.

But what if I did? What if there was someone to
wave a magic wand and turn me wild with lust
for a man–some men–most men–all men–

until even a little trace of stubble on a square jaw,
a pec flexed, a bulge in a tight pair of slacks–

I’m hopeless! I don’t know what straight women watch
for when they go out hunting for men–sent me reeling,

sent me clawing the walls and calling for all their
manly names and macho numbers.

I’d say, Fairy Godmother, keep your spell. But what
I’d really mean–beneath my soft voice and signature smile–is

Fairy Godmother, you can go straight to hell, and take your goddamn
straight spell with you.

I love who I love, which is what everyone says, but I mean
I love loving her whole being (her body, too) exactly the way
that I do–with my whole being (my body, too).

Translation: I have no regrets, no wish to be otherwise.

That is: If you give me a choice, I’ll choose queer every time.
If you make me flip a dime, I’ll mark the sides GAY and GAYER STILL.

–Julie Marie Wade, in Rattle #51 (Spring 2016)

I wasn’t going to do this, I wasn’t going to write about the Orlando shooting at Pulse because I am out of practice writing about poems and because I don’t want to speak for the LGBQT+ community. What can you say when you are in shock and grieving another mass shooting, this time in an already-marginalized community?

I live in Lafayette, Louisiana, where a man shot up the movie theater last summer. Several of my students in my composition class had considered seeing a movie that night. I’d seen a movie there a day or two before. I don’t look around for a shooter every time I go to a movie theater now, but I do often enough now to notice it. I look behind me, scan the faces of my fellow moviegoers to make sure they’re all watching. Last week my niece was in two dances of a community recital, and when some of the girls came on stage with prop guns in a different dance, I panicked. I looked at every fake gun on stage to make sure they were all fake. I looked around the auditorium, wondering what I’d do if someone started shooting again.

But this shooting in Orlando is not just about guns, not about my unease with guns, or yours. It’s also about a man targeting a group of people because he’s not okay with who they love, like, or have sex with–or even who they kiss. That’s not okay. It’s none of anybody’s business who we love, but it’s especially not okay to enact violence on someone because of who he or she loves.

Tonight, as I was typing up notes for my Modern American literature comprehensive exam, I came across this statement: “So much of American history is utterly lost to us because of acts of violence–it is only recovered through acts of imagination.” So that’s why I’m sharing this poem. This is your act of imagination for the day, to put yourself in Julie Marie Wade’s words and to know that there is nothing about being gay that isn’t worth celebrating.

-R

I always put my pussy

I always put my pussy
in the middle of trees
like a waterfall
like a doorway to God
like a flock of birds
I always put my lover’s cunt
on the crest
of a wave
like a flag
that I can
pledge my
allegiance
to. This is my
country. Here,
when we’re alone
in public.
My lover’s pussy
is a badge
is a night stick
is a helmet
is a deer’s face
is a handful
of flowers
is a waterfall
is a river
of blood
is a bible
is a hurricane
is a soothsayer.
My lover’s pussy
is a battle cry
is a prayer
is lunch
is wealthy
is happy
is on teevee
has a sense of humor
has a career
has a cup of coffee
goes to work
meditates
is always alone
knows my face
knows my tongue
knows my hands
is an alarmist
has lousy manners
knows her mind

I always put
my pussy in the middle
of trees
like a waterfall
a piece of jewelry
that I wear
on my chest
like a badge
in America
so my lover & I
can be safe.

–Eileen Myles, from I Must Be Living Twice (Ecco, 2015)

For a long time, I hated the word pussy. It sounded so animal, so primal and raw, so dirty. That last one–dirty–that’s what we’ve been taught to think about pussies, isn’t it? They’re dirty. You don’t use the word pussy because it’s sexual, and sexual is dirty, inappropriate. Who taught us to believe that? And why have we gone along with them?

Eileen Myles’ collection I Must Be Living Twice came out last fall, and she’s garnered a lot of attention from it and her appearances, both in cameo and in verse, on the show Transparent. This particular poem is quoted by Ali in a scene where she’s surrounded by lesbians who are gushing about the poet Ali’s befriended/considering studying with in graduate school. What’s most interesting to me is how this poem speaks to a lot of women today, even though it was originally published in the 1995 collection Maxfield Parrish.

As a woman, it’s empowering to read a poem that takes such control over a word that is often used in a derogatory manner: don’t be a pussy, which implies weakness and/or femininity. This, in turn, also implies the feminine is weak. It builds strength to take ownership of a word that’s been used against you or to turn others against you.

It’s interesting, too, the way the imagery in the poem works to demystify the pussy. There’s reverence in the poem, yes, but there’s also the use of ordinary objects. “My lover’s pussy / is a badge / is a night stick / is a helmet” implies there’s safety and protection. The lines “…is a bible / is a hurricane / is a soothsayer” implies power and destruction. Follow that with “has a sense of humor / has a career / has a cup of coffee / goes to work / meditates” and what we start to see is less of an idea of a thing we have strong opinions and emotions about, and more of something that exists every day in normal, common lives. If the pussy is no longer this mystical sexual object or insult we sling around, then we begin to equate it as something deserving of respect.

Myles’ poem is quite political in that the speaker is discussing 1) her own pussy and 2) her lover’s pussy. I’d like to imagine that the poem was quite scandalous in 1995, but really, I think it’s just as risky today as it was then, but perhaps in different ways. The LGBTQ community has made huge gains in the movement for equality, but there’s still much work to be done, and it is still a bold statement for a woman to write about her love for another woman. Myles even addresses this in the end of the poem. The speaker says:

I always put
my pussy in the middle
of trees
like a waterfall
a piece of jewelry
that I wear
on my chest
like a badge
in America
so my lover & I
can be safe.

The speaker puts herself out there as a means of self protection. Is it safer to live in hiding or to be bold enough to say, yes, this is who I am–what do you have to say about it? The answer is one that could be very different to each individual. Perhaps in a perfect world, people wouldn’t concern themselves with each others’ lives. But since we don’t live in a perfect world, what do you think: is it braver to declare, this is where I put my pussy?

-S

Little Things

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have–as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

–Sharon Olds, from The Gold Cell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987)

Late last year, I started remembering these extremely happy, silly things about my father. I would be driving to Target after classes ended to zone out, and suddenly I’d remember my father used to hate American cars, but around the time I started driving in high school, he got a silver Ford truck. It was so big and masculine and shiny, with racing decals on the side. All the high school boys loved it when my father and I swapped vehicles so he could drive my higher-gas-mileage car into the mountains on work trips. In the high school parking lot after school, several of the high school boys all but petted that truck. And I remember my father laughing, maybe even giggling over his nickname for that truck: TBNR. It was an acronym for Ford’s motto: The Best Never Rests. That big stupid truck brought us so much joy for a small period of our lives.

Maybe this seems weird, but I don’t know what to do with that memory now. It’s a happy one after years of terrible ones. I haven’t spoken to my father in three years and four months, and I don’t know if we’ll ever speak again.

When I told my friend Leigh of that memory, she said she’d just taught “Little Things” and I should read it. And? I haven’t been able to put down “Little Things”–or the collection of poems it came from, The Gold Cell, which is Sharon Olds’ third book. (The Gold Cell is filled with so many of Olds’ famous and best poems that it seems like a best of/selected poems compilation, but no, she’s just that good.) In particular, I have been living with these lines: “I think I learned to / love the little things about him / because of all the big things / I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.” That is exactly how I feel.

To be honest, I have struggled with how to write about poems since I started this PhD a year and a half ago, because I struggle for time and I struggle with finding the mental energy to write about them. But sometimes, I am hit with a moment of clarity about Structure and Style’s original purpose: to share poems we love. Leigh shared “Little Things” with me and it made me feel comforted, at least, that I wasn’t alone. I am following Olds’ speaker: “I am / paying attention to small beauties, / whatever I have.” And I am sharing this poem with you.

-R

As Traffic

Sounds like the hook in a chart topper
A rapper mouths squatting like a gilded animal
In the middle of a bustling boulevard
Of bumpers and bumping bikini rumps,
Chains, chains, chains, but it is meant to conjure
My half brother, and the girls the news says
He’d kidnapped or persuaded with knuckles
Before the police rushed in knocking him
Like a lover no longer loved to the motel floor
His long arm was chained to a cell phone
The one time I met him he called me brother
And said our father had more children like us
All over town while UGK’s “Int'l Players Anthem”
(“My bitch a choosy lover, never fuck
Without a rubber”) bumped in the background
Foolishly, I did not think the worst of the music
I adore had anything to do with having power
Over anyone else, the naked women as bountiful
As traffic, the half-naked men who cannot grow
Stiff without looking at reflections of themselves
While the camera glares an inch from their genitals
Might have wanted before porn simply to play
Hardcore like the hardcore rappers paid to be
Wrapped in chains of rhyme and the arms of women
Working for men who want to fill the soft pockets
Of everything with something of themselves
A camera swelled the locks on my brother’s body
In the courtroom the way police lights swelled
Over the girls he trafficked miles for money
And taxed for gas back home and the protection
He offered them from the belligerent johns
And, when called for, protection from himself
Before the judge denied bail, the ruling
Was on the news: “Columbia man charged
With human sex trafficking,” he will live in a cell
With the beautiful solitude chained about his throat
Growing over time as permanent and illegible
As what has been scratched tooth and nail
Into the cells–the music I have been playing
All my life is about pimps and who will be pimped,
But when my daughter is listening, I play something else

–Terrance Hayes, from How To Be Drawn (Penguin Poets, 2015)

I have been reading How To Be Drawn since the end of August, according to Goodreads, which is not to say that it is bad–it is really great, actually, full of wordplay and pop culture and commentary on what’s going on in the U.S., which is why I kept coming back to it–but it’s to say that my PhD program is kicking my ass and I am only now returning to the things I love, like reading poems.

So think of this poem as a warm-up, as an easing back into things you and I both want to read: it’s not a simplistic poem, but it is very accessible. Because c’mon, you know that UGK song. You know those lyrics: “(’My bitch a choosy lover, never fuck / Without a rubber’).” Don’t you laugh a little bit, maybe cringe at how forward those lines are? You’ve seen those car “bumpers and bumping bikini rumps.” You probably lived through the 1990s or at least the first decade after 2000, and you’ve seen hip hop videos. You’d like this poem just for those references, but it gets better.

I love that this poem has no periods, no stanza breaks, and few commas. There’s a lot of enjambment, but each line also starts with a capital letter, indicating that these lines are meant to stand alone, too. And there are some standout lines: “Of bumpers and bumping bikini rumps,” “Like a lover no longer loved to the motel floor,” “Hardcore like the hardcore rappers paid to be,” “Wrapped in chains of rhyme and the arms of women,” “With the beautiful solitude chained about his throat.” There’s a lot packed in these dense lines, and the line breaks help us to slow down to understand things like “Foolishly, I did not think the worst of the music / I adore had anything to do with having power / Over anyone else.” If this poem had more punctuation–end stops–we might demand more words, but these words suffice.

Now pause at those words. Is the speaker being hard on himself for “foolishly” not thinking about the music he’s listening to and what messages it projects–or is he aware and forgiving? Do we think about the things we listen to or watch or absorb as being antithetical to our values? Do we forgive ourselves? The speaker of this poem mentions porn, and I could argue that he’s talking about porn stars or men who watch a lot of porn, but either way they do it because they can, because they want “simply to play / Hardcore.” And now they “cannot grow / Stiff without looking at reflections of themselves.” Academics would call this scopophilia, deriving pleasure from looking–usually in a sexual context. But this goes further. Rappers don’t think about the chains they wrap themselves in, and what they represent. Middle-aged white women in my old gym don’t think about the rape culture in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”–they just sway their hips and keep dancing. You could say it’s just porn, just an accessory, just a song, just whatever, but there are real people out there, like the speaker’s half-brother, arrested for human sex trafficking.

And yet, we are complex humans and we get pleasure from things that don’t align with our values. I wear a Bad Feminist t-shirt all over town because I am a Bad Feminist. I am still bumping hip hop in my car because, I tell myself, no other mainstream music seems to also care so much about female pleasure, even though hip hop can also be really degrading toward women. I do it because I like the music. And the speaker of this poem? He says, “the music I have been playing / All my life is about pimps and who will be pimped, / But when my daughter is listening, I play something else.” Maybe there is no judgment and no forgiveness. Maybe this poem says, I like this thing which doesn’t completely align with my values, but I am okay so long as I am aware.

-R

The Fire

When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face–

and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she’s been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither–

all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.

You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,

you who thought you were her master.

–Katie Ford, from Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2014)

I’ve been reading and re-reading Katie Ford’s collection Blood Lyrics off and on for over a week now. I think I keep coming back to some of the poems because of her use of metaphor and the duality in her poems.

I particularly like “The Fire” because I feel exactly what the speaker means. The poem uses the metaphor of a fire to write about when someone is asked about an event or occurrence in life. My guess is that it also refers to when someone asks about a particular poem. Writers often find themselves in situations where readers want to know exactly what is true–even in fiction. Many times people assume a poem is about the poet’s life, and that’s often not the case.

There’s also a fierceness in this poem in the way the speaker wants to protect what is hers. This strikes a chord with me because I’m introverted and shy, so I’ve struggled at times to take risks in my poems or to be bold because I am not comfortable putting myself out there, even if I’m not writing about myself.

The point of this poem, though, is that we don’t have to answer these questions about our writing. We don’t have to say, “Yes this is true. It happened to me.” That’s our decision only. I personally don’t think we should lie about our experiences, but that doesn’t mean we owe our readers details about our lives. I love the lines, “…so the story you hear / is that of pines and twitching leaves / and how her body is like neither–” because the point isn’t to find out what’s true and what happened. The point is to experience the poem. The point is the fire, “which she feels in fine detail, / as if the flame were a dremel / and her back its etching glass.”

We live in a culture where it’s okay to insert ourselves into the fine details of another person’s life. We become so preoccupied with other people’s lives that we forget to experience our own. We want so much more that we miss out on the way literature and art can shape and influence us because we’re so focused on the details we aren’t given. We think we deserve to know, but we don’t. We’re missing the point. And Ford is quick to remind us, “When she speaks of the forest / this is what she is teaching you, / you who thought you were her master.” This turn in the poem resonates with me because even if I write a personal poem, a “true story” poem, the only details I owe anyone are the ones I leave on the page. I’m not obligated to fill in the blanks. Doing so would lessen the power of my writing. So, write without fear. And leave it all on the page.

-S