1.
I didn’t know the new name for it. That sound born of tongue and teeth, of sass and attitude’s sweet fire. That, if you weren’t cautious, could land a hot palm flat across your face. Steups. As a child living in Trinidad, that was the name I knew. A name devoted to the sound. And I was Queen Steups herself, flinging it from my mouth while cussing the lady stealing peppers through the fence of my grandfather’s yard, rolling it along my lips when I struck out during a game of cricket, hurling it beyond my small frame like a winged stone.

When my family immigrated to Queens, New York, there was no way I could leave my favorite weapon behind. I kept it close both at home and at school, invoking my inner rude gyal whenever the moment called. But it soon dawned on me that Americans did not call it how I called it. I couldn’t figure out the name and at such a young age, the fear of ridicule prevented me from even asking a question. Without the name, the sound slowly disappeared from my vocabulary.

Maybe it wasn’t the absence of the name that did it, maybe it was the slits carved by the blade of winter’s cold, or maybe it was the cruel expanse of concrete and asphalt, paved over indigenous burial grounds. Whatever it was, it chased me far into the hollows of myself, somewhere within the marrow. The new land quieted me. Robbed me of my spark, my slickmouth and audacity. The new land roped my tongue, stuffed sullied rags into my cheeks.

2.
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. I was reading M. NourbeSe Philip’s collection of poems in the whitest, most affluent space I had ever lived. I was at Georgetown University, enthralled by the intellectual rigor of my courses but also thirsting for a lick of my histories and philosophies among the unapologetically, predominantly Eurocentic canon. I was seeking some respite, a quick glimpse of my reflection when I walked into the Caribbean Poetry class.

I barely knew the function of a line break. I didn’t know about experimental, or conceptual. Or about the wars between poetic communities. I knew that I hated most poetry, that most poetry felt like a white noise squatting in the cave of my ear. Felt like rules and regulations, like it was holding up a great, unfeeling structure that had built itself both inside and around me. I also knew that when I eventually found a poem that I loved, I was transformed and willing to risk anything to protect the winds from where that poem came.

When reading the collection, the first feeling that rose up in me was not exactly love, but intrigue. It was a swirl of voices rushing in from all directions. Words taking up residence on all parts of the page, snaking down the margins, unfolding into a brilliant display. Poems like Discourse on the Logic of Language and The Question of Language is the Answer to Power flooded into me, murky yet familiar, like water I’d tasted before.

She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. The name of the collection is also the name of the poem that dug into me the most. It is a testimony of the disorientation and trauma that accompanies dislocation. Philip writes about the violence that occurred within and trailed out from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and European colonization, with an emphasis on the brutality of having one’s language hacked away. The poem draws inspiration from various sources, including dictionaries and gardening guides, a technique that pays homage the appropriation and compilation that made survival possible for Africans enslaved in the Americas. These practices safeguarded the future while retaining fragments of the past.

“Hold we to the center of remembrance/that forgets the never that severs/word from source/and never forgets the witness of broken utterances that passed before”

No, I did not have a good working knowledge of the mechanics of the poem. I couldn’t yet describe its moving parts but I knew that poem was in dialogue with my experiences, offering a witness and a companion. I knew what it was to be uprooted. I knew what it was to reach down and fist a soil that did not feel like it was mine. I knew how to ache for chenet and pomerac, to make do with the juice of another fruit. I knew the women in my family, how they held to the center of remembrance while working long hours and baking cassava pone and helping with the homework and telling stories of our blood’s great greats, thwarting time and its atrocities, pushing forward centuries of customs, surviving and surviving and surviving.

3.
“It is important, when transplanting plants, that their roots not be exposed to the air longer than necessary. Failure to observe this caution will result in the plant dying eventually, if not immediately. When transplanting, you may notice a gently ripping sound as the roots are torn away from the soil. This is to be expected: for the plant, transplanting is always a painful process.”

The ripping doesn’t always sound like ripping. For me, it sounded like locking the door of my room while reading textbooks and magazines aloud with the sole purpose of perfecting my American accent. And after I perfected it, the ripping became not knowing the sound of my true voice. I sounded American at school and Trinidadian at home. This difference was a source of shame, as if I was somehow not being my genuine self in either place. I eventually accepted the fluidity of my tongue to the point where I can sound completely Trinidadian, American or a mix of both, without being aware of when the change occurs. I learned that this fluidity is one of the most beautiful parts of myself.

I also learned that Americans call steups,“sucking your teeth.” To me the phrase is not as satisfying. It doesn’t contain the same memories of small, pleasurable rebellions as steups. Still, there is a magic in the act of discovering a name. To know a name is to change how you experience the ground on which the name is called, much like making a map of the tongue.

Desiree Bailey is a writer whose poetry and short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Callaloo, Transition, Muzzle and other publications. She has an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from Princeton in Africa, the Norman Mailer Center and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She is also a recipient of the Poets and Writer's Amy Award. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in Queens, NY. She currently lives in Harlem where she is an educator and the fiction editor of Kinfolks Quarterly. Her work can be found at desireecbailey.com.

 ​I’m hurrying to write this before someone else does. I’m hurrying to write this before I decide to take a safer, clearer route. Before the wine runs out, before the real cold sets in, before the next kid’s shot 16 times in the streets of my city and I have to start over and convince myself once again that the words are worth something. 

Just over a year ago, I’d finished a manuscript, and I thought it was pretty good. I’d spent two weeks in relative solitude at Hedgebrook and during that time one of my friends took her own life. I’d ordered and re-ordered the book’s pages, written new poems, shredded and rebuilt old ones, invented editing filters and — after Heather died — spent hours, days, nights, stumbling the woods and the bay shore, thudding with grief. 

After coming home, I put the manuscript aside, thinking to let it rest for a while before bringing it out again for tweaks, formatting, the usual stuff of getting a poetry thing ready to be considered by the world.

Then I finally read Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Specifically, I read the poem where she describes riding in a car with someone who says “his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.” 

And it’s not that I was shocked by the content, I wish I were — or rather, I wish we lived in a world where such interactions were rare enough to merit being shocking — but the poem presents this moment, this knife-twist’s worth of time, in a way that isn’t in any way preoccupied with being a poem. But it is, is a poem. And it’s simultaneously unconcerned with, unencumbered by, and in absolute mastery of, poetic form. It — transcends form. 

(Should we argue again or still about whether prose poems are poems? Should we debate the poem-essay-monologue-short-short’s craft? Can we talk about the sounds in the poem’s first sentence alone — just the sounds? “You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed” — do you see what I’m saying? Mastery. Transcendence.)

In the poem, she says “you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable.” I think it was in reading that, that I decided everything had to change for me. 

          You have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable,                  
​          hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now

I couldn’t put a book in the world that, even by implication, indicated that what she was describing wasn’t part of the now, part of my now, that ignored my current and historical part in it. And the form of the poem, along with that of the rest of the poems that make up the book, gave me permission, or admonition, or impetus, to make poems that didn’t hew to my traditionalist-tending sense of what a poem should look like, sound like, include, be.

I apologized to my friend-editors who’d devoted time to the manuscript, and set to rewriting. I decided I needed to interrogate whiteness, as the only way I could imagine authentically responding to the depth and vastness and dare of Citizen.  

Is this essay even a response to that poem? Is it a selfish turning of the lens on my white self instead of talking about that poem, which is nearly inextricable from the book as a whole? Am I crowding the spotlight again? But the request was to write about a poem that changed something for us. And I am/was/am changed. 

My friend died, and that was terrible, and common. We have this in common, all of us, this living and dying. Can we stop pretending that the before isn’t part of the now? Can we keep on? 

In her poem “My Dead Friends,” Marie Howe writes of how she asks the dead for advice. I do this too. The dead are never wrong. My dead are never wrong. Hers say, “whatever leads to joy.” They say, “to more life and less worry.” Mine say “whatever leads to truth.” They say “to more life and less numb.” 

So here’s to less numb, and more poetry. When the poem from Citizen speaks of faces being suddenly exposed to the wind, I know that’s what’s required. Stop the car. Slam the brakes. Let the words, those inadequate letterbags, lead the way. Let the time shorten between where we are and where we are going. Let us get there cold and together. 

​
​*Link:  from Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car...

Marty McConnell is the author of wine for a shotgun, (EM Press, 2012), which received the Silver Medal in the 2013 Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award (Publishing Triangle) and the Lambda Literary Awards. She is also a seven-time National Poetry Slam team member, the 2012 National Underground Poetry Individual Competition (NUPIC) Champion, and appeared twice on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.”

​McConnell’s work has been published in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2014, A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Movement, as well as journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Willow Springs, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. www.martyouloud.com

​Let’s face it. I’m a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.
 
—Hortense Spillers

​​I don’t always open the workshop by saying this is one of the most important poems of the 21st century when I’m about to teach Angel Nafis’s “Gravity” but I could, and I do sometimes, because it is. In a cultural moment where students have an ever-expanding ensemble of terms to describe their experiences of alterity (micro-aggression, fetishization, anti-blackness, appropriation), but not always the tools needed to deal with the way interlocking systems of domination affect them in their everyday lives, Nafis’s poem strikes me as an instrument for living, a special resource for those of us trying to sustain a kind of life in a place we were never meant to survive. Whenever I ask the students what’s happening in “Gravity,” i.e., where the heat is, they invariably talk about not only the astonishing beauty of the language, but also how the poem feels, to them, like the best version of what they wish they had said in a moment of racist or sexist encounter, what they would say back to the people and institutions that have made them feel small, monstrous, insignificant over the years. We talk about the titles of each of the poem’s two sections, how the relationship between “The Straw” and “The Camel’s Back” extends even beyond the popular idiom. We all agree that the eponymous “straw” of the poem’s first section is indeed the last straw, the straw that broke the camel’s back. But then there arises, almost immediately, this question of what a camel’s back might signify all on its own. Adrian says that the camel’s back is an illusion if you think about it and I don’t know what he means at first. He goes on to say that a camel’s back both is and isn’t what it looks like, that what you imagine is only flesh or bone is actually this deep deep reservoir the camel calls upon for life in the harsh climate it calls home and that maybe there are other things like that too. Maybe there is always this caesura between the infinite perceptions mapped onto us in a given day and what we feel is most true about ourselves. And perhaps those perceptions—rooted as they are in systems that do not love us, systems that cannot apprehend us fully by their very design—are not worth our energy. They merit analysis, for sure, but not investment. Not belief.
 
Oft times, the moment of micro-aggression is one that forecloses response, shutting down our capacity to react to the slight  that occurred only a moment ago, often because we are still reeling from the surprise of it, its sheer absurdity. “Gravity,” I would argue, gives us a vocabulary for those encounters. By the time we get to the second section, a radical revision of the worldview presented in the first has taken hold. The seemingly endless flow of casually antagonistic monologue which constitutes “The Straw”—the result, in part, of Nafis’s refusal to give the reader even a brief respite in the form of punctuation or white space—is overturned from the underground, upended by the agility and lyric force of the first three lines of “The Camel’s Back”: “When you born on somebody else’s river in a cursed boat it’s all downhill from there. Ha. Just kidding. I’d tell you what I don’t have time for but I don’t have time. Catch up. Interrogate that. ” Sarah says this is her favorite part of the poem, and that turns into a conversation about joy and playfulness, in the face of unrelenting terror and aggression; how it is even possible to move so swiftly from the violent language of “The Straw” to the joke that opens “The Camel’s Back,” this refusal of black life as tragedy, as emptiness, as the story of a people born(e) on a cursed boat, suspended in nothingness.  In response to the vitriol that serves as our entrée in the world of the poem, the speaker laughs. Each “ha” doubles as both a break and a kind of musical accompaniment, a beat to transport the reader from image to image, each more surreal than the last, a breath to rest while the speaker elaborates upon what their splendor makes of the world. One might assume that the speaker would want to respond directly to the voice behind “The Straw,” to assert their humanity in the face of such unrepentant degradation. But they don’t have time for all of that. And indeed, it is in this very refusal to respond, this unwillingness to answer to the language of white supremacist ideology, that so much of the poem’s power lies. At a certain point, we come to see that the poem isn’t really about the speaker in the first section at all. They appear and are quickly forgotten. They can catch up later. They can try. But they’ll never be able to keep pace with the speaker of “The Camel’s Back,” never keep track of the fugitive possibility the speaker carries in their wake. For once, they are not here to be interrogated. They are here to talk about beauty, about blackness, about blackness as a kind of beauty that has the capacity to transform the lived environment: “I’m here and your eyes lucky. I’m here and your future lucky. Ha. God told me to tell you I’m pretty. Ha. My skin Midas-touch the buildings I walk by. Ha. Every day I’m alive the weather report say: Gold.” In “Gravity” blackness is that which alters all that it touches, the un-thought, unseen force holding the world together.
 
At the close of the session, I have the students think together about what it means, and costs, to assert that we are more than the destructive language we have inherited. As a class, we give our oldest, most resilient shames to the page, re-imagining scenarios in which we were objectified, derided, and did not feel as if we could speak back to the voice condemning us. Time and time again, I have seen students emerge from this exercise with poems that lifted the entire room. Lyric assertions of their own beauty, brilliance and strength, pages upon pages of counter-history filling the table in front of us. This is the sort of social and political work a poem like “Gravity” makes possible. A language for our fullest selves; an elsewhere in which we can be defiant, together, unabashedly alive.  

Link to "Gravity" by Angel Nafis:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/250226

Let me start with a confession, something personal. Last winter, my father was diagnosed with liver cancer. We were estranged at the time. I hadn't seen him in nearly a decade when I visited him in the foothills of Tennessee. It was Christmas Eve day. He was in a hospital bed in the living room of his sister's house. He died ten days after I saw him.
 
I discovered Sharon Olds' poetry over a decade ago when I was a first-year student at James Madison University. Thank god I found that copy of The Dead and the Living when I did. I was eighteen years old and had just left home – an ex-railroad town in rural Virginia with a crippled economy and a bedrock of racism.
 
I was an avid keeper of notebooks and gatherer of fragments, an accidental poet in the making. Besides trying to simultaneously come to terms with and shake a family history of alcoholism, poverty, and trauma, I was lonely. This was not because I needed someone (that would come a few years later) but because I craved, without knowing it, a more ardent exploration of a sense of self. 
 
The occasion of Sharon Olds' poem "I Go Back to May 1937" is the speaker imagining what might have happened if she had been able to prevent her parents' marriage.
 
The first time I encountered this poem, I recognized the parents as my mother's parents. I recognized the speaker as both my mother and myself. I recognized the family that would be made and unmade.
 
Olds' poetry is personal and visceral. She often writes of the body and its fluids and processes – birthing, shitting, fucking, eating, dying. In a 2011 interview with The Independent, Olds describes figures and images that frequented her early work: "Poems started pouring out of me and Satan was in a lot of them. Also, toilets. An emphasis on the earth being shit, the body being shit, the human being being worthless shit unless they're one of the elect."
 
The situation with my father, our estrangement and his death, was as fucked up and awful and real as you might imagine. When we saw each other that Christmas Eve day, neither he nor I could do anything to resolve it. We had both waited too long.
 
After he died, I wrote about it and wrote about it until I couldn't see outside of it. I published some of that writing. I won contests, paid my rent, and made a living with that writing. I have no apologies to offer for this. I don't know what is appropriate to think, feel, write, and publish and when. Appropriateness has never been a skill or an interest of mine.
 
I am my experience and my perception of that experience. He is my experience (as was I for him, however seldom we saw each other). My work is my experience.
 
I know this is not true for every poet, nor do I think it should be. But this essay is a defense of the confessional and post-confessional modes and their capacities for complexity. This is simultaneously a call for directness and openness.  
 
I was recently in a graduate workshop with the talented poet, essayist, and editor Carmen Giménez Smith. Much like her writing, Giménez Smith's workshop style was precise, intuitive, and to the throat. After nearly seven years of graduate school, I know the conventions and limitations of a writing workshop. Sometimes the atmosphere in these classes can turn hostile as aesthetic camps and personalities clash and divide, but what I've more commonly found to be true is the opposite: sometimes we're just too nice.
 
Yes, we're afraid of offending the poet, but I think we're more often afraid of inhabiting poems – spending actual time and mental and physical energy with the complex thing before us, figuring out its parts, how it works, and what it is trying to do.
           
Giménez Smith was neither nice nor hostile, but she had inhabited the poems we'd submitted for workshop that day. She held us accountable to them. Why did you make this choice? How is this title more than a placeholder? What is the purpose of this list, this fragment, or this rhetorical move? How can the entire poem rise to the occasion of its best line? Simply put: she wasn't afraid of stating things clearly or asking questions directly.
 
We exist in a culture that openly mistakes female directness for aggression. What I want to stress is this: the same willful cultural misunderstanding and aversion to female directness is reflected in attitudes toward confessional and post-confessional poetry. The root of the problem is the same, especially when it comes to the intelligent, articulate, and unapologetic female voice. Especially when that voice is interrogating the personal: sex, violence, the body, motherhood, desire, categories of identity, shame and the interconnectedness of all of these. When she is speaking of the interior workings of the home and the family that should be kept under wraps. (As you probably know, Olds' work has often been criticized and resisted for its content and directness.)
 
Under wraps: literally the veiling of the body and its processes. To cover up.
 
But doesn't the thing still exist beneath what hides it? The body continues to pulse, the life ticks on in days and kitchens and bedrooms. Still we strive for this constriction of the body, of language, of transparency. (Let me be clear: I'm not talking about truth or authenticity; these notions are problematic enough for me.)
 
For the workshop with Giménez Smith, I'd written a poem about my grandfather. More specifically, my poem was about nightmares I've had of him since I was a child, and how these dreams can bleed over and shape the surreal landscape of day. From what I have gathered, he molested most of the women in my immediate family. This wasn't in the poem, but the poem revolved around the fact.
 
"This poem has a lot of secrets," Giménez Smith said. "We get a lot of the effects but not the causes. You need to just stay what happened, what's going on. Name it."
 
Naming can be horrifying. To name a thing can risk giving it authority as well as taking it away. I've written this before in another essay: When we talk about a thing, name a thing, do we increase or reduce its power? When I say a word over and over does or gain or lose momentum?
 
In October, I attended a lecture by Carolyn Forché at Marquette University. As a poet of witness and a curator of poetry of witness, she acknowledged (and I am paraphrasing here) the potential problems associated with "political poetry" – how poetry that is ideological cannot succeed because meaning (the message) is decided before the poem is written.
 
But things can come into being in and through language. Meaning making, according to Forché, can come from an openness to accident, to a state of not-knowing.
 
Confessional and post-confessional poems that fail do so for the same reasons as didactic political poems: if the goals, expectations, or motivations are overtly predetermined, if the representations are simplistic or binary, and the poem is self-interested only.
 
Navel-gazing, proselytizing, lecturing, masturbating, self-pleasingness.
You've heard all this before. These points have been made. I don't know that I am breaking ground here, but I've learned that some questions are worth constantly revisiting.
 
What are we overlooking in regards to confessionalism and post-confessionalism? In his essay “Confessional Poetry: My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did," Regan Good claims, "Certainly, we all weary of sentimental poems lacking in craft. But to reject the confessional mode as passé or reductive would be to reject a kind of poem that has a great capacity to humanize.”
 
To look at a thing directly or to speak about a thing directly or dare to give it a name does not mean we are decided. I do not aim to foreclose uncertainty. Forché centered on the importance of inspiration being born from the words (the disposition) "I don't know."
 
She referenced Wisława Szymborska's perpetual wonder at the accident of being: "And why am I here? / On a day that’s a Tuesday? In a house not a nest? / In skin not in scales? With a face not a leaf?"
 
Forché spoke of how each answer (poem) will be makeshift, never complete, and done with necessary humility. This reminded me of something the Alaskan poet Joan Naviyuk Kane said when she gave a reading here in Milwaukee in September. Kane had recently taken a small group of Inupiaq women elders to visit King Island (Ugiuvak in Inupiaq) – a small, rocky island in the Bering Sea where a group of Inupiat people lived until they were relocated to the Alaskan mainland in the mid-1900s. At the reading, someone in the audience asked Kane what she had learned from the trip and if she was going to write about the experience.
 
I think we all expected some tidy nugget of wisdom but Kane, fortunately, refused to sum it up. She said (again, I'm paraphrasing from my notes), "What I learned from that trip is how little I actually knew in the first place, how much there still is to understand." I thought, yes, that is poetry: the more we learn, the more we write, the more we realize how little we know.
 
Poetry, Forché said, should move toward rupture, fragment, and lock picking. Regarding confessionalism, Good writes: "Only by ruthless scrutiny of personal weaknesses–and the relinquishing of one’s reason to associative thinking–are clear, moving, necessarily fleeting portraits of the self possible. The brevity of these insights – the slipperiness of them – fills the analyst’s hour (and great confessional poetry) with its exquisite pathos. There is no absolution, no purification, no easy answer to the searching lyric “I” of true confessional poems."
 
"Poetry is born out of insecurity," Chris Marker, Sans Soleil.
 
The central mistake is when we believe poetry written in the confessional or post-confessional mode cannot be multivalent, that these poems can't be borne of the "I don't know" disposition. We misstep when we assume these poets are only interested and invested in their own experience, when we assume that their concerns, the concerns of the work, do not reach beyond the personal, the individual. Of course there are self-indulgent and self-centered people and poems, but the real majority of powerful writing being done in the personal realm is neither self-indulgent nor self-centered.
 
Olds in her interview with The Independent: "I've never said that the poems don't draw on personal experience, but I've never said that they do. The dialogue that I'm comfortable having about them is one to the side of that actual subject. Art is so different from life. It's just so different."
 
We write about ourselves and our experiences to purge the self, to write through the self, and see her from the outside, yet still stand on the inside (ultimately, we cannot escape this position, at least not while alive). To meet or speak to other people, other women, there who can relate to our experiences, our suffering, our hunger. We write of the self to be a person in a world among other selves. Is this not the human project in one of its most obvious forms? Not that we can explain ourselves to each other or solve, but that we acknowledge.
 
When contemplating post-confessionalism on Harriet, The Poetry Foundation's blog, Jeffrey McDaniel writes: “I guess for me, ‘post-confessional’ would apply to poems that enter into a place of psychic fracture, often involving family, and elaborate on or develop techniques used by the confessional poets.”
 
In her lecture, Forché said the ethos of poetry constitutes a response to these things. She was referring specifically to poetry written after state-sanctioned trauma. I'm interested in writing in the midst and the aftermath of private, domestic trauma.
 
After his death, I discovered all these photographs of my father I hadn't seen before or had forgotten about. In many of these photos, our smile (grimacy, wide, apologetic, hopeful) is the same: finally something of myself reflected back to me in the world. This is a form of following, haunting, an acknowledgment in retrospect. All these poems, simply: I'm sorry I was so late.
 
Despite her desire to prevent the harm they will cause each other, the speaker in "I Go Back to May 1937" decides against intervention: "I want to live. I / take them up like the male and female / paper dolls and bang them together / at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to / strike sparks from them, I say / Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it."
 
She chooses existence and experience, to be made and unmade, to seek out a sense of self, however shifting. To speak from a place of psychic fracture.
 
Forché: "Poems can be ghosted language."
​
Giménez Smith: "Haunting can be active."

​******

Link to "I Go Back to may 1937" by Sharon Olds:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176442

Caitlin Scarano is a poet in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee PhD creative writing program. She was a finalist for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology and the winner of the 2015 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, judged by Eduardo Corral. She has two poetry chapbooks: The White Dog Year (dancing girl press, 2015) and The Salt and Shadow Coiled (Zoo Cake Press, 2015). This winter, she will be an artist in residence at the Hinge Arts Residency program in Fergus Falls and the Artsmith's 2016 Artist Residency on Orcas Island.

I forget how old I was then, but during one of my father’s birthdays we threw a party for him. He got really drunk and at some point he was sitting at the breakfast nook in our kitchen crying, uncontrollably. He used to drink this Spanish brandy— Fundador. When I was young that bottle felt so large and ominous in our cabinet. When I was old enough to want to try alcohol I snuck a taste of it and I remember how it felt like a punch to the throat. The party was still going, but my mother took him to bed. She came down the stairs, and I asked why he was crying. It’s because he misses home, she said.
 
That was the day I understood what it was that my parents had lost by coming over to this country. That our experience in America comes from a foundation of loss. That this is the sacrifice you make to give your family a better life. You grow up seeing these things. You try to make sense of the ways that each of your parents adjust and grow into being a person living here. You see the wide chasm between your experience and theirs. You grow frustrated with the lapse in communications. I was their first American born child. It’s a terrible thing, to grow up looking at your own parents as foreigners. But I wonder about their own difficulties in having a child who is completely familiar and their own, who is their flesh and blood, and yet speaks a different language.
 
I don’t know why I wanted to become a writer. When I picked up a Creative Writing major during undergrad, I thought I could tell some stories. I thought I might be good at that. I hardly considered poetry. I didn’t grow up with a Youth Speaks or have young poets come to my classroom and put me on to the power of expression. I just thought it was dry and obtuse. Then during my Junior year I met Jaime Jacinto. He was teaching at SF State at the time. I took some of his classes and even TA’d for him once. Before him, I had never met a writer who was Filipino. I felt invisible in my program and there wasn’t anyone who was really paying attention to me. Only Jaime was.
 
I think about his poem, Heaven is Just Another Country, often. It was the only thing I had seen written that reflected my own experience back to me. It is a poem that is very Filipino, but more than that is very Filipino American. My people tread a lot in non-verbal communication, but there is a quiet desperation to connect that is so pervasive. In the poem there is a moment when the voice recalls combing their father’s hair.
 
          At the mirror, I draw
          my comb through his hair,
          wipe the gleam of pomade
          from his forehead, and again
          he tells me he’s dying.
 
It’s the only time there is any touch in this poem and it’s so absolutely heartbreaking to me. Beyond the specter of death that looms over the poem, there is this need from the speaker to express love and care for their father. Earlier in the poem the speaker talks about hiding the father’s whiskey bottle after noticing that he’s gotten a bit too drunk. It’s a subtle gesture, but at this moment this is how they know to show love to this father who is probably as vulnerable as he has ever been, who may be dying, though nobody is talking about it. I remember doing that same thing to my father’s cigarettes. I did it because I wanted him to find it and know it was me who hid them. So he could see me and know how scared I was for him. That moment when the speaker combs his hair is the realest, most intimate thing that can be done. And this is the moment where they most effectively communicate.
 
There are different ways I can look at the title of this poem and what to make of its ending. Do we believe that to leave home the ways in which we did was to suffer a kind of death? The death of who we once were in order to become this new thing we are now. Or do we say to those we love, that to leave us would be just like taking that long journey across the Pacific— that we know this route well, that we should not be afraid to say goodbye when the time comes?
 
I think of my father crying at the breakfast nook and the idea of the weight of loneliness that is mentioned in the poem. And how much that weight existed in my home. In a lot of ways it kept our family together. In a lot of other ways it can be a burden we carry with us. I don’t write because I need to express anything. I really don’t give a fuck about expression. I am desperate for answers. I’m desperate to understand who we are in this country. I may never get an answer I want or one that even makes sense— but who we are, our pain, our struggle are as viable as our joy, our elation, and our triumph. Our stories are a beautiful thing. And I could spend the rest of my life wading through all of our beauty just to get a glimpse of a life that makes any sense.

1.
 
From his usual spot
at the head of the table
in a Chinatown restaurant
I can hear him saying,
I’m going to die,
not to me or anyone
in particular, it’s the weight
of loneliness he’s talking to
and though he’s already
had a few, he orders another
whiskey before dinner.
 
With mother giving
the signal, lips pouted,
pointing with her mouth
as if to say enough already,
I slide his drink behind the
bottles of vinegar and soy sauce.
 
When the food arrives
I help him from his chair
to the men’s room.
He relieves himself,
fingers like knobby roots
on his fly, guiding a yellow
stream down the steaming tiles.
 
At the mirror, I draw
my comb through his hair,
wipe the gleam of pomade
from his forehead, and again
he tells me he’s dying.
 
2.
 
I pretended not to hear
unaccustomed to your trust
and instead remembered
when we first arrived here,
how you were still a young man
new to a country
that needed your work,
to sit at a desk,
chain smoking and drawing
blueprints for houses
you never even saw.
 
I wanted to be seven again
and ride with you past the
factories and railroad yards
down to the warehouses,
to your desk of scattered papers
and an ashtray piled with cigarette stubs.
 
But then we are back home
and I watch you slump into an armchair,
your body soaked with whiskey.
 
Tonight, you say,
heaven is just another country,
and getting there is no harder
than that trip 40 years back,
on your first airplane ride to America
when you sang and prayed
like your own son beside you
because far below there was
nothing but blue sea
and the empty sky
that brought us here.
 
* “Heaven is Just Another Country” has been reprinted with the permission of the poet and Kearny Street Workshop
 
**Jaime was associated with Kearny Street Workshop. The organization was started in 1972 by a group of visual artists and poets in San Francisco. They did so to create opportunity and spaces for themselves because the mainstream art world wasn’t offering it. Although he wasn’t a founding member he was around a few years in. They published his first book of poems. Today I work for this organization as the program manager.
 
*** Along with Jaime, there were many Filipino poets that came up in the Bay Area during the 70’s including the late Jeff Tagami, Shirley Ancheta, Virginia Cerenio, Lou Syquia, Oscar Peneranda, and more. And not to mention, the long time OG poet of Manilatown, the late Al Robles, who my friend, Regie Cabico, once referred to as our Walt Whitman. 

Dr. Choi,
 
We’ve never met,
at least not in any “physical” or “biblical” sense,
but I’m a huge fan of your work.
I’ve always been a sucker for sodium dependent bicarbonate transporters,
so it feels really good to get all this off my ample and perfect chest.
 
I mean, you’re a big deal, Dr. Choi,
and that’s coming from the artist responsible for
Spy Kids 4: All the Time in The World.
I don’t mean to brag, but it’s in 4D.
 
To be very frank— 
can I be very frank, Dr. Choi?— 
Well, you’re the reason I took on the role of Sue Storm in Fantastic Four
and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
I thought maybe, if I held a clipboard and put on a pair of
sexually repressed nerd chick glasses, I could— 
it’s pathetic, I know.
Anyway, congratulations on winning US Weekly’s “Who Wore It Better: Labcoat Edition.”
I know people say you’re always showing up in US Weekly
without actually getting any new grants, but
pssst, industry secret: that’s the point.
 
Oh, Dr. Choi!
Lately I’ve been seeing your face everywhere,
not just at the 2011 Renal Science Awards (or “Reenies”)
or in the film adaptation of Frank Miller’s highly acclaimed graphic novel,
Spleen City.
No, I see your face in every beautiful, ethnically ambiguous,
middle-aged Korean man I see on television.
And not in a racist way.
 
Okay, maybe in sort of a racist way.
But I hear you do the same for me, Dr. Choi.
Word on the street is you ask your daughter if every JC Penny model
and mildly brunette reality TV star is me,
Jessica Alba.
Maybe it’s because you don’t know the names of very many celebrities,
 
And why should you?
We spend two years at an acting conservatory
or an hour in the back of Michael Bay’s van,
pick up a few movie gigs if we’re lucky,
hopefully gain the respect of some of our peers in the celebrity community— 
Nothing, I’m sure, like the life of a scientist,
all the glitz and glam,
the designer test tubes,
the nip slips at the physio convention red carpet,
Billy Bush constantly peeking into your bathroom window
to ask about your favorite hibachi restaurant— 
 
I can’t imagine what it would be like
if the world cared as much about what I had to say as they do you,
if I was the one in the spotlight
and you were the unknown one,
the humble everyday magic maker
hidden away in a little lab,
discovering entire worlds of truth
without even a glance from the peeping tom eyes of America.
If everyone and their father knew my name
but thought yours was just a hassle to pronounce.
 
What kind of screwed up world would that be?

Sometime in late 2011, I’m sitting in the doctor’s office with my pants slung around my ankles, being taught how to inject myself with testosterone, which will eventually lower my voice & thicken my limbs & make the veins in my forearms bulge like the raised parts of those 3D maps & put stubble on my chin that I’ll never really learn to shave & allow me to move in the world as male, at least mostly.
 
Weeks before this first lesson, I have to recount the history of living in my body to my doctor & two medical students that he is training in this kind of thing & who I’ll never see again. I answer more or less honestly: yes I have a history of depressive episodes & anxiety, yes I’ve been on meds for these, but not right now (though I will be again) & who hasn’t? My doctor—I feel I should mention that he is a white guy, a nice one—then, had told me that, in his experience, his patients generally feel “much better” after beginning hormones; less anxiety, more motivation to stick around. Much of it, he thinks, (& by “it” I assume he means feeling bad) is due to the stress of appearing to the world as what one is not & I smile though am, in fact, bewildered.
 
For as long as I’ve been aware that I exist, I’ve been the kind of person who feels somehow alien to the world of other people, for innumerable reasons or for no reason at all. So, you’ll have to forgive me for thinking this an odd prediction, that I will begin looking more like my father & then suddenly feel as though I can walk around at ease. This doctor, I think, was imagining the hormones as a kind of time travel device, as if they would undo my years as a black kid in a white majority city & then suburb; as an over-achieving child of academics who was consequently called upon by teachers to account for the academic “failure” of the other black kids in my school, even though we came, many of us, from different worlds & I was just a kid who didn’t know anything at all; as a girl who wasn’t quite one; as the child of a depressive who, consequently, paid far too much attention to the adult world & its incessant & mundane violences & who, like all girls (of all sexes), entered adolescence & then became intimately acquainted with the entitlement of men. As if everything that had gone into making me would dissipate & eventually disappear.
 
In 2011/2012, then, I was searching for other ways of thinking about gender, about having a past, about having been a little girl; I didn’t want to become unrecognizable to myself. Fortunately, sometime during this period, my will-be dear friend Sam read to me from Lauren Berry’s The Lifting Dress, which opens with a poem in which the protagonist (The Just-Bled Girl) is mute when faced with a doctor who is described as a “beautiful thing,” but seems instead dumbly comical & dangerous. The poem declares: “There must be hundreds / of ways to be a girl.” Indeed.
 
From here, we are pushed into “Notes on How to Love a Boy,” which is a poem I come back to whenever I find myself feeling somehow only adjacent to the rest of the human world. “Notes on How to Love a Boy” is about many things, but most obviously it is about identifying with the non-human world, a meditation on the gendered effects of having been ruined / of ruining. It tells the story of a neighborhood boy who is stung, terribly, by wasps in the protagonist’s backyard while she “indolent in a rusted lawn chair, did nothing.” But more than doing nothing, she is clearly delighted by how the boy is “Red. Wrecked.” perhaps because she understands that these wasps were defending themselves from his invasion, as she could not. Consequently, more than with her mother who pays the boy’s hospital bill & writes a note warning others to keep out, the girl identifies with the hive, imagines herself growing up to join them; on the edge of adolescence she wants “stingers instead of leg hair. Instead of legs.” After all, in the human world the boy is cared for at the mother’s expense & we have to understand that this “expense” is monetary, but that it is also much more general.
 
The Lifting Dress, in the most basic summary, is the story of a girl coming to understand the gendered world after having just been raped by “The Big Man” who lurks in the image of this boy. In his encounter with “The wasp world” however, the boy (who, remember, is the one who has entered the world of The Just-Bled Girl without invitation, who has disturbed the hive) isn’t cared for in the aftermath of his transgression, but comes away as red & wrecked as the little girl had been. However, rather than trying to create an all-female world (as the mother does when she hangs a sign warning the neighborhood boys to keep out), The Just-Bled Girl finds herself drawn to the world of men & boys: “The wasp world was one that loved boys / as wrong as I did. Why was it that our mission / was to make men less beautiful?” This is a queer (trans?) circuit of identification: the girl, by loving boys wrong, seeks to make them more like herself & in order to do this, she has to become something other than a woman. Or, at least, become a woman differently than her mother.
 
Of course, given wasp social structures, where most hives are organized around a single queen, it’s more than likely that these wasps were male, even though the girl sees them as “lady-wasps.” But, also, since the hive functions as more or less one organism, the male wasps are ladies, in a way. Here is a world where gender works differently, where male energy is organized in service of & not against the female body, which is why The Just-Bled Girl’s incessant identification with the non-human world (oleander trees, wasps, horses, wolves, carnations, a barrette, secondhand furniture, berries…) is both a symptom of her victimization & her resistance to it, her defiance of the logic of gender, her attempt to navigate the world on different terms: “Red. Wrecked. Those insects rushed to his eyelids / without fear. Of all the women / in the world, I find my sisters here.”
 
Though they love The Lifting Dress nearly as much as I do, my friends seem not to understand my intense identification with it—the book as a whole & this poem in particular—in part because Lauren Berry is a white cis woman from Florida & I am a black boi from the Midwest/East Coast: I’m certain we have very little in common. Still, for whatever reason, it is white female poets (Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Maggie Nelson, Lauren Berry, Anne Sexton, to name a few) who have given me the most robust language I have for understanding myself, for making sense of how the experience of having been a girl can produce a kind of perversity/strangeness that is like faggotry, but is not quite. Near the end of The Lifting Dress, there is a poem in which the protagonist, no longer just-bled, fantasizes about fucking an oleander tree, doing to it what had been done to her as a child, because they are so alike, because “it’s what I look like.” While the idea that little girls’ sense of self is somehow more permeable than little boys’ is a cliché & is too often used to justify the continual production of narratives in which girls grow up to repeat their mothers’ mistakes, the way that Berry works this idea produces something quite queer, in all its senses: a world the little girl I was can inhabit & from which I can emerge without leaving her behind.
 
Link to "Notes on House to Love a Boy" by Lauren Berry:
http://www.versedaily.org/2011/howtoloveaboy.shtml

​Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). A Cave Canem fellow, his poems have appeared/are forthcoming in The Journal, Vinyl, The Seattle Review, cream city review and elsewhere. Cam is currently a doctoral candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Find him at cawkwardrich.com.

“They would / Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees / Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder.”         

            — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from “Song”

I was once asked to discuss the “brutal experiences [my] poetic bodies suffer” and in hindsight, I think perhaps I dodged the intent of the question, discussing more the manner in which my work dresses up/spins the violence—less about the violence itself, where it comes from, why I choose to include it.

*

My father is a hunter. I was raised by death. At times we were markedly poor. When we finished the season’s kill my father had stocked away in the freezer and money ran thin before payday, my lunch was packed with creative wonders like crackers and mustard or carrots and spiced vinegar. Mother made do. Over time, I stopped eating meat altogether. It was easier. Cheaper. I didn’t have to kill anything.

*

When I was quite young, a neighbor girl made habit of crossing through our backyard to climb the fence into her own yard. One day I stopped her in the walkway, told her she couldn’t cut through anymore. She tried to pass anyway. I knocked her to the ground and said something awful. She told her mother. Who told my mother. Who smacked me. The girl never cut through our yard again.

*

Once, my grandmother found and gave to me a robin’s egg. Perfectly blue. I let it sit for weeks in a makeshift nest and call to its family. Then I cracked it open because I knew that it was no longer its mother’s. I marveled at its milky yellow yolk, perfect and miniature. When my mother found the halved shell, she smacked me.

*

In seventh grade, I was shy and gangly and awkward. That year, a girl intentionally kicked a soccer ball into my face and I sat still and bled all over the gym floor. That year, another girl body-slammed me into my locker, demanding I never set eyes on her again. I turned red and went to class. That year, a group of girls raided my gym locker. I’d forgotten my padlock. Afraid to take a fail for the day, I changed clothes, folded the brand new checkered fleece pullover my mom had spent months saving to buy me for Christmas, and prayed. After class, the locker was empty. Only paper and textbooks left on the floor. I wore dirty gym clothes to all my classes. Everyone noticed. Later that week, I spotted my fleece on a popular boy who was flanked by girls from my gym class. I did nothing. Everyone noticed.

*

Once, I rescued a wounded bird who’d been struck from her nest during a storm. Once, I rescued a feral kitten who was drenched in vomit. Once, I rescued an abandoned dog riddled with mange who was roaming the side of a highway. I write all my animals into brutality. I’m always trying to prove a point.

*

When I was 12, a boy I liked tied my wrists with a phone cord and raped me while eight of his friends watched and cheered. Then they ransacked our house. They fled when my father arrived. He asked if I was running a whorehouse.

*

I was introduced to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem, “Song” by my dear friend and poet, Scott Beal. Familiar with my compulsion to navigate violence through surrealism, he knew this poem would reach me. He knew that a goat’s severed head singing a sweet song into the night would reach me. He knew the poetic bodies of girl and goat and mischievous boys would reach me.

*

Once, I accidentally hurt a boy while skipping rocks in a creek. The blood was staggering. He told his mother. Who told my mother. I ran and hid. When she found me, she dragged me from my hiding spot, refused to hear the story. I offered my middle finger and she beat me.

*

Once, I was charged by a German shepherd. I stood my ground. I did not flinch. I did not run. He circled me and came to a halt. He let me touch him. Stroke his neck. Read his tags. I returned him to his family.

*

When I was 15, a boy I liked pressed a knife to my throat and described the sound of cutting through bone. He explained how easy it would be to kill me. I dared him to do it. When he couldn’t, I called him a coward.

*

Each time I introduce “Song” in workshop, I lose time to someone debating its place in the genre of poetry. Is this even a poem? It looks like prose. Reads like a fable. It’s called ‘Song,’ maybe it’s just a song? No stanzas? What is a poem at all? What is poetry? But I force my own patience. I know what will come. Awe of magic. Resistance to slaughter. Admiration of language. Empathy. Lament. Wonder. Grief. Solace in making magic from suffering.

*

Tucked somewhere in a family album on a shelf in someone’s living room there is a yellowing photograph of me as child holding a carving knife to the skinned haunches of a slaughtered antelope. I am smiling.

*

Once, my mother smacked me and I struck her back. She beat me to the floor. I covered the welts with makeup and went to school. 

*

Once, my mother’s boyfriend showed up drunk with a prizefighting pit bull. He locked the dog in the garage and disappeared for months. I kept her fed but she was impossibly vicious. Animal control killed her on-site after scarcely any questions. I still can’t forgive myself.

*

When I was in high school, I went to punk rock shows and slammed my body against other bodies over and over in the mosh pit because I had nowhere to place my rage.

*

When my mother turned up with a bruised lip, I threatened her boyfriend with a baseball bat.

*

The boy with the knife stalked me for a decade.

*

Once, I found a mutilated cat who’d fallen from the window of a high rise apartment. I knelt near him, ready to end his suffering with my own hands. A neighbor arrived just then, insisting she take him to a veterinarian. I told her he needed to be euthanized. I told her to hurry.

*

Once, during an argument, I leapt on the hood of a boyfriend’s car as he was driving off. I slammed my fists against the windshield over and over. My hands turned the color of charcoal.

*

When presenting “Song” at a recent workshop, an unfriendly woman looked me directly in the eyes and began to berate me—in third person, passively vicious: If she’s teaching poetry, shouldn’t she bring a poem? Shouldn’t she be able to define poetry? Why is she leading this? I suppressed the urge to choke her. Later that evening, I read my own violent poems and she bought my books and thanked me for telling her story. I suppressed the urge to choke her.

*

When I was 27, I was gang raped by four men for three hours.

*

Once, my father locked me in my room for some bratty adolescent transgression. When he came back to talk it over, I was so enraged about being trapped, I slammed my fists into his back.

*

Once, I spotted my mother’s abusive ex-boyfriend at a bar. I approached his table and reminded him who I was. Told his friends what he’d done. Taunted him. Dared him to touch me as he had her. When he finally erupted, I smiled. A brawl broke out. I struck and struck. Like a need.

*

When I was 36, a man I was dating attacked me in my sleep. Raped me in my own bed. I threatened to cut him. He called me crazy. Then didn’t. Then did. He confessed. Blamed a dubious psychiatric disorder. Apologized. Then didn’t. He threatened to ruin me. Started stalking me. My friends. He threatened them. Their children. Called us liars. Then didn’t. Then did.

*

Doctors say I have PTSD. I don’t sleep. I panic in rooms with too many men. I flinch in tight spaces. I keep my tongue. Then I riot. I keep calm. Then I ignite.

*

A more adequate answer to the brutality question might have been: Writing the violence not only allows me to release it, it allows me to haunt its agents.

*

I punched a hole in the bathroom wall at 12. Gashed furniture at 15. Seared tire marks into pavement at 22. Punched a taxicab window at 27. Dislocated a door at 31. Knocked a hole in my bedroom wall at 39. I bloodied my knuckles on a wall/table/door/window at 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 31, 39. I cut into my own arms. I beat bruises into my own body. I opened my own wrist. Because rage. And grief. And survive. Because there is nowhere to place all of this.

*

Once, I collapsed on the sidewalk in a town I do not know because the weight of violence was more than my bones could continue to bear. I crumbled like so much sand. And no one stopped. And no one helped. And I was that girl on the gymnasium floor again. Thirty-eight and still covered in my own blood. And I hauled myself up off the ground. And I hauled myself down the street and across all the miles back to New York City and into a police station and into an interrogation room and I told them how I got here. How a woman survives and survives until she doesn’t anymore. I told them about the boys and all of their hands. About their hearts beating harder.

*

Once, a friend showed me a poem about magic. A poem about loss. A beautiful poem about the brutal suffering of poetic bodies. A sweet goat who cried and struggled. A girl who loved a whole love and lost her love to a grisly stunt. A poem about grief. The fracture of irreparable grief. A poem where a heart can fly as a bird in the night sky. Where the massacred sing and go on signing. Where the tormenters learn to listen. Once, a sweet goat’s severed head reminded me how to sing. How to haunt.  

Link to "Song" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly: 
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/song#

JEANANN VERLEE is author of two books, Said the Manic to the Muse and Racing Hummingbirds, which earned the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in poetry. She has been awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Her work appears in failbetter, Yemassee, PANK, and Adroit, among others. Verlee wears polka dots and kisses Rottweilers. She believes in you. Find her at jeanannverlee.com.