How the World was Made 1

Over the next few months I've decided to post the prose-poems from the manuscript 

How the World was Made

Flight to Venus/Mark Flowers

Even though most of the poems have been published in print or in online journals, I simply can't get the whole thing published.

I now have five unpublished manuscripts that talk to me late at night, wondering when they’ll see the light of day (It might be interesting to go into an analysis of the labyrinthine world of publishing here, but I'll save that for another day).

I suppose it's time to start my own press. Why wait for someone else's nod of approval? It's a time-honored tradition in poetry. Although it requires some initial cash...

How the World was Made
was written between 2009 and 2016. The words and stories in the book absorbed those years - and the years beyond. Poetry is news that stays news.

Without further ado, here are the first three prose poems.

 *********

Mining

I have been traveling into the earth since before my great-grandfather was born. It is something I do consciously, connecting back to the dead. I am not saying this from inside a dream. I have an alarm clock next to the bed.

I can hear the tunnels beneath the floor. Each tunnel has a different word that it repeats, has been repeating since before my great-grandfather went down into the earth. I follow each word down until it blends into another word. “Sell” dissolves into “Sin.” “Sin” dissolves into “Salute.”  There are men still cutting tunnels down there, so the permutations are endless. I am not saying this from inside a dream. I have a knife next to the bed.

I’ve seen my great-grandfather down there. I’ve seen yours. He has quick scavenging eyes, albino skin slick as a cave fish. His claws reach out, tear at the earth. His nails are sharp, long.  He doesn’t need a pick-axe or shovel; he doesn’t need a light. He has become a perfect digging machine. He lifts dirt to his mouth, chews, swallows. I am not saying this from inside a dream. I have a pair of gloves next to the bed. 

Our ancestors keep eating. I hear them chewing and swallowing. They do not know how to stop.  They will replace the earth. I am not saying this from inside a dream. I have a book of matches and a gallon of gas. I will follow the word “fire” down until it dissolves into “fish”.

(Previously published in Hanging Loose Magazine and in a 2River chapbook in the US; and previously published in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist in the UK)

**********

My Mother’s Body

When the war was over, she danced. Everyone danced, touched each other, bodies so close, but it was innocent, wrapped in victory. She wanted to dance this victory dance for the rest of her life; to be so close to so many, to be touched, but no one touching her in that way...

Her body is the keeper of all secrets; thinner and thinner, disappearing inside her clothes, trying to become wind. Leaves fly. Walnuts slam against the porch. Winter is almost here. Her body believes in national security, keeping the things that should not be said from being said, keeping the things that should not be felt from being felt, keeping the things that should not be remembered from being remembered.

Night after night, when I look in the mirror I see her drunk father stumble into the house, stare through her, leaving the front door open, snow blowing across the floorboards. I see her mother stare out the kitchen window, transparent, silent, and thin, so thin. Is this true? 

Encrypted messages pass back and forth between satellites that shoot across the night sky, never touching the ground. I cannot look away from my face, down at the rest of my body. I know parts of my body are disappearing, too, and I don’t know how to bring anything back.

Holes. Sacrifice. Everyone must do their part.

(Previously published in Hanging Loose Magazine in the US; and in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist in the UK)


**********

March in Denver

Clear sky. The sun is a furious bird. Coal trains move through the mountains to the west. So many brilliant cars pass the anti-war signs speared into grass. When a car honks in support, a friend screams “Park your car!” He has only a few seconds to explain all of history.

The governor is up in the mountains, fishing. He casts his line. Concentric circles ripple through a jet trail. The sun opens its beak, a tongue of flame flickers. We march down Market Street. A couple of elementary school kids raise their fists and shout “Fuck the War!” A few teens holding shopping bags stare at us, confused. One raises a middle finger. 

The sun flies from the mouth of a drunk vet: “I’ve been to war! What do you know about war?” I want to tell him the sun is a bird lover, a steel girder, a Hollywood movie starring the first atomic bomb; that it never stops burning eyes into the open face of water; that it never stops churning language back into blood for all of us to drink; that it eats time (that strange soft tissue); that only water throws it into relief. 

We shout in front of the Halliburton high-rise: “War profiteers!” It’s Saturday, so of course no one’s inside. The sun ignites the back of a trout up in the mountains. The governor reels the fish in, laughing. A protestor with the face of a clown smears red paint across Halliburton’s glass doors. Suddenly, everyone is smearing red paint across the glass. The lone security guard rushes off to call his superiors. We run, laughing. We have stopped nothing.

(Previously published in Serving House Journal)

*******

Andres Rojas: From the Lost Letters to Matias Perez, Aeronaut

This is another episode of  "Poetry? I just don't get it..." A series where I post a poem or group of poems by one author, followed by anything the author wants to say about the work. This time around it's a poem by Andres Rojas. (Other poets in the series can be found on the tab above.)

Last spring, I was surfing the net, looking for poems of a friend of mine, as you do (see the last post of "Poetry? I just don't get it..."), and found a few at Compose. I clicked to the staff page, to see who the poetry editor was, and was stunned to see the face of a friend I hadn't seen in thirty years: Andres Rojas!

In the late 80's I lived in Jacksonville, Florida, and during that time I was lucky enough to hang out with several wonderful poets and artists. One of those artists was Andres. He was born in Cuba and came to the US at the age of 13 (on the Mariel Boatlift). He is poet, essayist, editor, philosopher, singer/songwriter (watching him play his songs back then encouraged me to start writing my own)... 

I followed a link on Compose to his blogsite and began reading his published poems and immediately wanted to post one here. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Notre Dame Review, among many others. For more of his poetry, go to his site at: https://teoppoet.wordpress.com/.

It is how Andy speaks of loss, and its connection to absence, that draws me in. Read the poem, then read the essay, then read the poem again. So many connections in such a short span of time. Illumination awaits.

***

FROM THE LOST LETTERS TO MATIAS PEREZ,  AERONAUT

I imagine what you saw—a boulevard

of moonlight on water, waves

like names on a chart,

your absence, like weather, a given.

My father disappeared

into another country

when I was five—why

not you, a hundred years before?

My first memory is him.

He carries me against his neck,

the beach receding as he walks us

into a life I don’t yet see.

Sometimes I wish

that were the last of him

I kept. Of what’s beyond us,

we know nothing, or we know

enough, the particulars of loss:

sand, the westering sun,

a wind-seized balloon,

the sea.

(Previously published in AGNI)

***

Of What’s To Come

                                                Being dead means being left behind.

                                                                        And being alive comes to the same.

                                                                                    --Gjertrude Schnackenberg

Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars

David Bowie died on January 10th, 2016, on my sister's birthday. Ziggy Stardust is one of the few albums I've never gotten over; "Rock and Roll Suicide" nails it: "and the clock waits so patiently on your song." I've tried to cover it, but I don't have the range. Reach and grasp, and so on. Bowie’s death on my sister’s birthday was a reminder of what we really celebrate when we celebrate one more year of someone’s life.

            

Seventeen days later, my friend Shelbey emailed me a writing prompt she had ran into, "You are an astronaut. Describe your perfect day." Her piece began, "It takes ninety-two minutes to circle the earth." That's the International Space Station's orbital time. The ISS is 236 miles high, but closer to Earth than my home in Jacksonville, Florida, is to, say, Atlanta. Moving at the ISS's speed, I'd get there in 50 seconds. My friends in south Florida are hours farther. Of course, these things are relative: the higher you are, the slower you go, and the longer it takes to go around the earth back to where you started from.

            

I answered Shelbey with a quick, 11-line poem (all of 56 syllables) riffing off Bowie, "We Know Major Tom's a Junkie," imagining each orbit as a life-cycle: a quick life, a quick death, followed by another, and another, and another. (I write about death often; it’s my go-to metaphor for loss.) 

Over the next few days I drafted and redrafted the poem, but I felt it had stalled. On February 8, 2016, I happened to read (and copied into my journal) Soren Stockman's "Morning in Wyoming," which had been published almost a year earlier in The Literary Review and which I'd belatedly found via Twitter: "Death will be gorgeous. There is no love / when there is nothing but love." What do we, the living, know about death? Maybe not much, but more than the dead, who don't even know they are dead: there is no death when there is nothing but death, but there’s not much else either. 

I turned Stockman's words to my own use: "Death / will not lack beauty / altogether, nor that love / which never takes us with it." Then, on February 16, 2016, I hand wrote a few lines on the latest draft: "I can't tell what you see right now." On the 18th, the 13th anniversary of my father's death (of hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver, but more on that later), I wrote, "I imagine what you saw." I'd gone from observing my own limitations to empathy, and I felt the writing shift under me.

            

Matias Perez

Five days later, the first draft of a new poem launched by my father and that new line arrived in the person of Matías Pérez, Cuba's legendary (lost) balloonist. Pérez was an early ballooning enthusiast who became a folkloric figure: on his second flight out of Havana, he vanished, never to be found except in the popular saying that still endures: "He flew off like Matías Pérez." What happened is easily surmised: after a long day of waiting for strong winds to subside, Pérez took off from Old Havana on what he imagined would be a short flight to the west. Instead, the wind carried him north into the Florida Straits, where he came down that night with no hope of rescue. He was not the first, and certainly not the last, Cuban to die in those waters.

            

I was, of course, using the new poem to address my father in all his absences: when I was five, he left for the United States; as far as I knew, he had disappeared, vanished. He thought my mother (pregnant with my sister) and I would get our exit visas in a matter of days and follow him to the U.S. shortly; I didn't see him again for eight years. He was 90 miles and a universe away. I wrote him a few times, and he answered once, but he was not one for writing: I think he coped with his loss by not thinking about us after a while.

Mariel Boat lift, 1980

By the time we reunited in Miami, via the Mariel boat lift, he had become addicted to heroin and had kicked the habit, taken up quaaludes and alcohol (he was not a good drunk), and made and spent a significant amount of money as a small-time drug runner in South Florida. He had a void somewhere in him that could not be filled, but he did not fail to try: power over my mother, my sister, and me, in various manifestations; prostitutes; casual drug use over the years; God before, during, and after both the prostitutes and the drugs, until he was too ill and had only God left. He could be friendly and entertaining if he didn't feel threatened, but being around him was like living with a wild bear who could go into a dark rage at the slightest perceived provocation. 

After almost a decade of trying to have any real connection with him, I finally removed myself as much as I could and kept him at bay for the last 14 years of his life. This time I was the one who did the leaving; his death simply confirmed what I had already accomplished. I had mourned his loss already, years earlier. There is no loss, I suppose, where there is nothing but loss, but there's not much of anything else either. Thankfully, I have never been in such a desolation, except through my father.

            

Ironically, I find myself working on this piece over Father’s Day weekend – ironically because “From the Lost Letters to Matias Perez, Aeronaut” is not about my father any more than it is about Matias Perez or Bowie’s Major Tom. While writing the poem, I was accompanying my mother to her radiation appointments following a cancer diagnosis and a (successful) partial mastectomy. For several years I had been preparing myself for the inevitable (I have loss issues, yes; I do these things), and yet when the time came, I found myself wholly unprepared for the possibility of her loss. She is in the poem, too, but no one would know it. 

At the same time, I was coming to accept that my last six years of work had not produced a publishable manuscript: despite dozens of queries and contest submissions, despite hundreds of dollars on manuscript consultation fees and entry fees, I was still bookless (and still am, though I now have a nifty phrase to show for my efforts: “It will not be for lack of trying”). I was, though not literally (not even literarily, though there’s hope there), letting go of the expectation I would soon have a first book out and instead girding for the reality of a long, grinding process still ahead, with no guarantees.

            

Of what’s to come, I know nothing or I know enough. I think I know enough. Most of us do, of course. There is no wisdom where there is nothing but wisdom. Randall Jarrell called it pain; I prefer to call it life. And there is no life where there is nothing but life. Or, as Jarrell also put it, the ways we miss our lives are life.

Andres Rojas

***

Some Links

The Perils of Poetry/Tedx talk with Andres

Season of the Dead 
Season of the Dead (audio chapbook) 

2River 

On the Blink (feature)  
And Other Poems

A-Minor Magazine
My Heroes Haven't Always Been Real (essay on AGNI Blog)
The Cossack Review

2 New Poems in 2River

Hola. 
I've got two more prose-poem-type-things from the manuscript, How the World was Made, appearing in the great online journal,  

The 2River View.

Sarah Katharina Kayß/from Summer 2016 2River

 

Run by Richard Long, 

a professor of English at St. Louis Community College--Meramec, 2River has been an online quarterly site of poetry, art and photography, since 1996. 21 years! 

 Since then, the journal has expanded into a site with the 2River Chapbook Series,

and a blog, Muddy Bank.

James Deeb/from Spring 2016 2River

2River also published a chapbook of mine back in 2009 (the  prototype for this new manuscript). It is also called

How the World was Made.

Alexandra Eldridge/from Fall 2012 2River

In addition, 

Richard takes photographs and makes movies from his bicycle while traveling in the summer self-supported around the United States. He puts many of those photographs and movies on his wilderness blog, richardtreks.blogspot.com.

Photo by Richard Long

*****

 Here's the beginning of one of the poems. It has the title of my last book. Go figure.

 All the Beautiful Dead 
(along the side of the road)

This happened ten years ago, back when I was living in Des Moines. My marriage had ended and my ex-husband had taken off to the west coast with his new love. After he left, I quit my job at Olive Garden, put everything in storage, rode my bicycle to Dubuque. My sister lived in Dubuque with her two girls, Liz and Dar. I needed to see them. But I needed to get there slow, wrap my head around what had happened. 

Being so close to the surface of the road, I began to notice all the dead animals along the shoulder. It was shocking how many there were. You never notice the bodies when you blow down the road at fifty or sixty miles an hour. Sometimes I would stop, crouch next to them – hummingbirds, possums, cats, turtles. I still don’t know why – to let them know that someone saw them, acknowledged that they were part of the world, that they would be missed? 

You can read the rest (and the other poets)
 here.

Katrina Pallop/from Fall 2011 2River

...

 

Meanwhile, 

I'm giving a reading from 

All the Beautiful Dead 

at Innisfree Poetry Bookstore

in Boulder, Colorado,

this Thursday at 7pm.

Innisfree Poetry Bookstore

If you know anyone in the Boulder area,

let them know. 

Bopa-lalla.