first an ego, and then pain, and then the singing

honest

The eye wants what it wants first. 

The trick is older than naming:
what the mind makes solid
from ink, from the accidents
of positive and negative space.
Someone draws a vase. Someone sees
two faces about to speak 
or kiss.

My mother in the kitchen, my father
at the door. The question being,
which one leaves? Which gesture
was tenderness, which was
the hand already waving goodbye?

You learn to choose. You learn
the cost of choosing. To see the rabbit
means you murder the duck, or vice versa.
The world is full of these erasures,
what you attend to, what you let die
in the peripheral dusk.

I’m not sure if you’d call it a Dabbit or a Ruck,
but either way it looks like prey.

I have lived my whole life
in the space between the ears and the bill,
in the flicker, the mind’s stutter
between one truth and another.

The optometrist asks: better here? or here?
as if improvement were so simple,
as if the lens could make me certain.

But I know now what I’m looking at. 

How prey
makes a Self from whatever shape
the world agrees to. 
How we 
draw the lines
then wait to see what hunts us.

<n>Radio Thin Air</n> by <n>Nick Flynn</n>, from the book <n>Some Ether</n> published by <n>Graywolf Press</n>.

The poem <n>Good Bones</n> by <n>Maggie Smith</n> from her 2017 collection of the same name.

~~***Frog Soup***~~

I take your poem apart like a frog
in high school biology,
the first cut always the hardest,
that membrane of meaning
stretched taut over intention.

Your metaphors sprawl
across my kitchen table
at 2 AM, whiskey-stained
and desperate for attention.
I catalog them: 
*Nature/Death/Love*
-the holy trinity of poets
who think pain makes them profound.

Line breaks like broken ribs,
each caesura a small violence.
You scatter your commas
like breadcrumbs for critics to follow
into the dark wood of your subconscious
where symbols grow wild
and unexamined.

I taste the salt of your adjectives,
the bitter rind of forced rhyme.
Some lines dissolve sweet on my tongue,
genuine grief, honest lust,
while others stick like bad meat
between my teeth.

Your alliteration allures and annoys,
that desperate drumbeat of consonants
marching toward meaning
you’re not sure exists.
I separate your stanzas
into neat piles:
*The Good/The Trying Too Hard/The Parts That Almost Work*

But here’s the thing about dissection,
by the time you’ve named
every ventricle and nerve,
the heart has stopped beating.
Your poem lies pinned
and labeled on my desk,
beautiful and dead
as a butterfly behind glass.

Still, I understand now
why you chose crimson over red,
why that line about your mother
comes third instead of first.
I taste the whole recipe
in each measured ingredient:
two cups of loneliness,
a tablespoon of hope,
salt to taste.

The soup, when assembled,
feeds nobody.
But the hunger
that made you write it,
that hunger is real,
and raw, and worth
something.

The poem <n>Late Poems</n> by <n>Margaret Atwood</n>.

The poem <n>The best defense is offensive</n> from <n>Marge Piercy</n>'s book <n>To Be of Use</n>.

-

Would you tell me if you were laughing at me? Would you tell me if I were the punchline scratched into bathroom stalls, the story passed hand to hand like contraband, growing teeth with each telling? 

I know I shouldn’t care. 

But I do care, the way flowers care about rain, the way prisoners care about keys. I must know because not knowing is its own kind of death, a slow dissolving like sugar in bitter tea, and I have already been sweet enough for strangers, already melted into their afternoons without my consent. 

So tell me. 

Am I the fool or just foolish enough to ask?



A 2018 poem by <n>Diane Seuss</n>, originally published in <n>The Rumpus</n>.

A poem from <n>Blythe Baird</n>'s book, <n>If My Body Could Speak</n>.

Poem <n>I'm Not Faking My Astonishment, Honest</n> by <n>Paige Lewis</n>, published by the <n>Academy of American Poets</n>.

Collage based on the poem <n>Counting</n> by the poet <n>Nayna</n>.

Big Trouble

The poem <n>If You Come Softly</n> by <n>Audre Lorde</n>.

<n>Late Fragment</n> by <n>Raymond Carver</n>, from the 1989 collection <n>A New Path to the Waterfall</n>.

A poem from <n>Margaret Atwood</n>'s collection, <n>Eating Fire</n>.