Month: December 2022

Matthew

Matthew, this would have happened with any first poem you got your hands on: repeating lines mantralike. Any good poem could have been that for you. That’s how poems work and how we move through what Hazard Adams calls the offense of poetry.

Matthew, all poems have an incantatory power.

Matthew, Eliot had some issues. Big ones. Pound, who you also mention, too. Maybe you address that in your essay. I’m just responding as I read the piece. Let’s see if you factor those issues into why there might not be great fanfare right now for great work.

Matthew, we don’t even know if there will be a one-hundred years from now let alone what poetry will or will not be celebrated at that time. Do you have tea leaves we can’t see? A divining rod? A hat with a rock in it?

Matthew, you’re etherizing your own essay on the table now. I can barely read this. I have a bad heart. Your words are making it clomp and stomp.

We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so. Matthew, I’m going to have to ask you to vacate your essay now. Please. There’s still time for you to not complete it, to not publish it, to save … oh, wait, you’ve already published it.

The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world. Matthew, this is deranged. There are so many rural places. I live in one and am surrounded by them. Travel.

Permit me, by way of argument, a medium-size quotation. Matthew, this is your freaking article, in The New York Times. You know you don’t need our permission to include your little medium-sized quotation in your essay. And it is sized, not size. At least for us Gen X editors.

Matthew, my eyes are glazing over at your essay, not poetry. It’s not your fault I have POTS, but your words are literally inducing presyncope. And I use literally the way any good Gen Xer would: to emphasize something literal while expressing my annoyance at having to do so.

Matthew, I do like Milton.

Matthew, does science disenchant? Does technology deaden? That’s not been my experience of either. Did the stove and the kitchen sink wreck the blues? Or were they folded into lyric and life alike?

Matthew, why do you think poets of all people can’t see the world as anything other than an undifferentiated mass of resources to be either exploited or preserved? Make your case, or do you think you’re doing so in this essay?

Matthew, yes. Poets can draw from everything. Everything! That’s not bad. What do you … why … what’s really bothering you, Matthew?

Matthew, I like some of these paragraphs you wrote about Eliot and LSJAP.

Matthew, I don’t know that Eliot is an end-of-tracks poet. I just don’t buy that.

Matthew, I see that you’re about to reference Slavoj Žižek. Please don’t. I beg you.

Matthew, Žižek also plagiarized ideas. You know that, right? And frankly, others have also said that thing you say he said. It’s also not a very interesting thing to say. I prefer Fritjof Capra on similar matters.

Matthew, I feel like you’re upset at the internet, not poetry. Am I getting close? Can we go then?

Matthew, I need to do some shit now like ignoring men like you. One of you, your ilk, tried to destroy me years ago. By one I mean many. It didn’t work. I’m here on behalf of muses, of mystery, of wonder, and of words you might not know. Time for me to mutter, retreat.

One more thing, Matthew. The problem is content. The shift to content. That happens on the internet but is not of the internet. It’s just shit that’s happening, mostly on social media and driven by forces you didn’t even manage to allude to. Unless you did and I nodded off.

Hey, what’s your last name again, Matthew?

The First Face

I feel for those who’ve come out about Jeff Church and am especially moved by Young and Manning’s accounts of seeing Church’s face when they re-experienced what Church did to them.

I know that feeling of seeing a face overlaid on other faces and not knowing what to make of that feeling.

I know the feeling of entire states feeling marred, of a face overlaid on other faces within that place.

For me, it was Georgia.  But not just Georgia. Illinois. But not just Illinois. Missouri. But not just Missouri. Tennessee. But not just Tennessee. 

I had to trace my trauma all the way back to that first state, the one with the sound of home built right into it. And it was my home: Oklahoma. 

Oklahoma and its swirling faces. Its drunken faces. Its maniacal faces. Its aged hidelike faces. Its taunting faces. The home of that first face which jacked up all the others. The face of a man aptly named Jack.

The face attached to the body that held me after I was born. The face that posed with me in my first photos. The face I would later associate with one of my first words: “Daddy.”

When I was little, my parents marveled at the way I could spin a globe and find Oklahoma lickety-split just as the orb stopped spinning. “There, there, there,” my insistent little finger said, staking claim to that stolen state the way my ancestors had during the Land Run. 

There: that where, that no/where, that now/here I can’t shake.

That land where my father lies beside my mother—him in a silky casket, her more elegantly in a little black cremains box—in the cemetery that also has a Catholic section, a children’s section, and a section where forty children who died in a 1918 fire at the state mental hospital were dumped in an unmarked mass grave.

Oklahoma is eternal within me. No Masonic or Hermle clock governs its presence in my body. The trauma—that first trauma and the countless ones that followed—has no timestamp. The Red River is as it was then. The bullfrogs are as they were, plentiful and at times inconvenient, especially when they flooded the road flanking the river. The moon lowering and lowering until it meets the sandy riverbed and shimmers like an arched doorway to heaven or hell or maybe just to someplace better, someplace where pain might exist but suffering isn’t manufactured faster than mobile homes and oil pumpjacks.

The scissor-tailed flycatchers and red birds and robins my mother loved. All as they were. The starlings my father hated. As they were and also as they are now: outliving him, as am I.

The streets and highways and gravel roads that my father wore down, ditched out, careened along protecting and managing his drawling and sprawling fief. The sound of tires hitting seams in the concrete sections that made up a stretch of I-35 and the way the El Camero or later the Monte Carlo or later the GMC van shuddered a little when the front and back tires hit each joint. Ka-dung. Ka-dung. Ka-dung. Ka-dung.

My beloved dog is as she was, the one my father let me keep. She still runs back and forth from one window to the next over my lap as we reach either our city home or that other home in Texoma, depending on whether we were coming or going. I’m still there with her, as I was, laughing, delighting in her joy. Because she brought me joy, even in that family, even in that life, even growing up with an unspeakable father, a boundaryless father, a cradling father who broke the bough over and over. One who made me fall then told me he was saving me when he caught me. Where being saved was his bed, almost every night. And his friend R—. And his friend C—. And the strangers on the other end of the CB radio, the ones he made me talk to. And that one trucker the day my father pulled over and met up with him. How my father called me out, made me stand beside him, showed me off. How nervous that trucker looked. How he wanted to leave. How my father compromised him by making him drink a beer before he left so he’d have the smell of alcohol on him if he tried to do anything like call the cops. How the man said he didn’t want to drink the beer. How my father made him. How the man complied and ran away after doing so. Or maybe he didn’t nearly run away. Maybe he liked the beer, the danger, even my father, just not little girls. No. He didn’t like my father. My father terrified him and meant to.

That father. That first face. That first confusing, crushing pain. That leader. That schemer. That pistol. That man who shocked everyone into quaking compliance.

That man who doesn’t scare me. The one who (s)pawned me, the one who toyed and turned me into a toy. The one who passed me, passed me, passed me around. It was like being on a merry-go-round only without my mother, Merry, there to catch me when I fell.

My Dog, My Hands, My Buttery Butter-Stick Fingers

I know when my dog, Lexi, is happy. I know when she’s sad. I know when she wants to be tickled. I know when she wants me close but doesn’t want me to touch her. I know when she’s waking me up because she’s scared versus happy versus feeling playful versus wanting a tummy rub versus having to potty really bad.

This morning, my dog had to potty really bad at 5:09 a.m. That was a hard way of entering into today, but I did it because when I have to use the bathroom, nobody makes me wait until it’s convenient for them. And because I don’t “have” a dog, even though I used the phrase “my dog” above: I live with a dog, I love a dog, and I share my life with a dog. She’s family. And my bestest family member had to potty at 5:09 a.m. this morning.

I was sleeping soundly—my mattress and pillows are puffy clouds soundly—when Lexi woke me up. I was dreaming of something. What was it? A subway, glimmering tile, water in the distance, a weaver I know, an unnamable feeling, and some Southern Utah LGBTQ+ community overlord trolling my Facebook page telling me what not to say.

I didn’t want to get up, especially not at 5:09 a.m. in December, which feels the way 1:09 a.m. does in June. So dark. So nightlike it could never pass as anything other than night. Not dusk, not dawn, not the cusp of dusk or dawn.

My hands are cold. My keyboard is loud. My ears are sensitive. My fingers are sliding off keys. I’m writing off-key, too, because I’m typing letters in the wrong order, all of them. (Thanks, dyslexia.) There’s no flow in the writing for me right now, which makes writing unbearable.

My fingers are hard sticks of butter qwertying without finesse. I know my fingers are smaller than butter sticks, but that’s how they feel so I’m sticking with my imperfect metaphor. Do they make miniature butter sticks? If so, all the butter for this hard metaphor spreading across my nearly inoperable fingers at what is now 5:51 a.m.

A writer posted on Twitter yesterday about marriage being for everybody. I thought he said “margarine.” That’s emblematic of the unsolicited gifts dyslexia gives me daily:

Margarine: It’s for all of us, not just some of us!

Hilarity ensued as the writer and I had a good chuckle over the outdatedness of margarine and how, for now, butter has the upper hand, which is funny because we’re back to hands, which obviously makes me think of my hands or at least my fingers. We’re back to my sloppy butter/finger metaphor. (Yes, I went there. Sue me. Puns are a sign of intelligence.) There’s no escaping this metaphor. It’s smeared all over this bleary essay like butter on a slice of toasted bread.

The thing is, margarine has a hell of a story. It rose to fame during World War II when butter was in short supply, so it and other fats were rationed.1 Margarine had been around since 1869, but it had a problem, which was its color.1,2 It was white. It was plain. It was super meh to look at, which made it unappetizing. We eat with our eyes, after all. (That’s actually not entirely true, and it’s an ableist thing to say.) In a word, margarine suffered from oilism.

The solution to the meh-ness of margarine? Dye!3 Margarine was mixed with vegetable dye to make it look sunny, like the butter everyone knew and loved, the color we used to paint our kitchens before beige then gray then greige then white then apparently beige again shouldered color out of our homes.

And here’s the really interesting part: The customer had to do the mixing. Margarine was originally sold in its white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the “home cook,” meaning the woman of the house, had to mash into the margarine until the concoction turned yellow.3

But I digress. I’ll write a proper essay about margarine later. What I wanted to say this morning is that my dog, Lexi, got me up early. I understood exactly why because she came from an abusive situation in Texas where she was bred by an unethical breeder. She’s learned how to overread and overcommunicate with humans in a way I’ve never seen any other dog do. Strikingly, in the year since she’s lived here, she’s learned how to imitate me when she needs to convey something, anything, everything. She can’t use language like I do, but she knows how to use her entire body—from her ears to her eyes to her paws to her tail—in various combinations to say things like, Mom, quit giving me those silly kisses. Please know I still love you, though, and want you here next to me. Just ‘no’ on the kisses, OK?

She talks to my husband and me like this all day long, and it’s the most adorable and endearing thing ever. Dad, why are you close to the back door with that coat on, but you aren’t looking at me like you’re about to take me outside?

Or Don’t you see me lying here like a piece of driftwood, so good and so quiet, but also so hungry? I don’t want to be demanding or anything, but you totally forgot to feed me. You’re at least ten minutes late doing that. Do you want me to be this sad piece of driftwood forever?

Or, a new one she added recently that I had trouble translating: Mommy, mommy, maaaaaaaaaawmeeeeeeeee. I feel weird and have to, like, lie here like this on the rug in the middle of the living room, aimless and foggy. I don’t know what’s going on. Is the floor quicksand? Is it, like, holding me down or something? Am I, like, stuck here forever?

That was the day we gave her one-quarter tablet of trazodone before a visit to the veterinarian to make sure she hadn’t cracked her tooth on a toy that’s not supposed to be capable of cracking a dog’s tooth.

The most intriguing part of all this is that she acts like me. These aren’t generic communications. She tilts her head the way I do. She puts her paw on my chest the way I put my hand on Jon’s chest when he’s rushing up to me too fast and I need to whoa-nelly his overly enthusiastic approach. She mopes the way I mope and lets joy flood her body the way it floods mine. She even dances like me.

Lexi’s asleep now on the flokati rug in the living room that we call her Floofer, not to be confused with my electrophysiologist, who I call Dr. Flvoolr because that’s what I called him right when I came out of anesthesia the other day. (Dr. Flvoolr is not his actual name, but it’s sort of close. I got three of the seven letters right.) Lest you think we’ve relegated Lexi to the floor, that Floofer is on top of a fluffy dog bed which, in turn, is on top of our moderately uncomfortable mid-century-style sofa. It’s nearly a princess and the pea situation, Lexi’s Floofer setup.

My hands are warmer now, but they still aren’t serving me well. My ears are ringing. The keyboard still sounds like someone rummaging around inside a drawer full of Legos. The lamplight interrogating my desk is as taxing as the first general income tax ever imposed in our country, which occurred during World War II, when the number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million by 1945.4

(All that taxation and a gal couldn’t even get her hands on a stick of butter. I know, I know. It was a war. A big one. I get it.)

I want to go back to sleep like Lexi has, but now I’m staring the day right in the eyes. It’s staring back. I tried turning my head slightly the way Lexi would as a calming signal. The day isn’t averting its gaze. I’m trapped here among the wakeful, at least for now. Time to putter around the house, grab some breakfast, and catch up on the news. Kyrsten Sinema! Britney Griner! Elon Musk! President Biden and Title 42! Fourteen more books designated as “pornographic” by the Washington County School District in Utah—including several by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood! There’s never not news these wide-eyed days. My new favorite pastime is reading the news before my husband or my friend José has, then being the one to break it to them, especially when the news is salient, good, strange, or all three somehow—the perfect news trifecta.

Below, I’ve included a poem I started writing in 1995 about margarine when I was taking Robert Stewart’s poetry class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s not the best poem, but I like it and it’s relevant, so there it is. It’s my one-thousandth version of the poem and is the best shape I could whip it into. I may not have whipped it like butter, but I like to think I at least whipped it good.

—

Margarine During War

Women keep settling
(oleo, factory jobs)
though they pine for sex
the way they long
for butter on their lips.

After war, they dab
eye shadow and rouge for men
whose war-whores
didn’t teach them to kiss.

But the women
hoist skirts, drop stockings,
for soon the bread they’d break
would be kissed with butter
(real butter).

—

Sources

  1. Yglesias, M. (2013) Guns vs. Butter, Slate Magazine. Slate. Available at: https://slate.com/business/2013/07/butter-rationing-guns-vs-butter-in-world-war-ii.html (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
  2. Vaisey-Genser, M. (2003) “Margarine, Types and Properties,” in B. Caballero (ed.) Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Second. Elsevier Science Ltd.
  3. Magazine, S. (2011) Food Dye Origins: When Margarine Was Pink, Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/food-dye-origins-when-margarine-was-pink-175950936/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
  4. Tassava, C.J. (no date) The American Economy During World War II, EHnet. EHnet. Available at: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).