A Poetry Squawk
By Jenna Lê
Author of Six Rivers and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora

Like all kids who grow up to be writers, I was a daydreamer from the start. My childhood daydreams were straightforward wish-fulfillment fantasies: I dreamed of winning Olympic medals in figure skating, of being a detective who brought criminal gangs to their knees, of owning a goldfish, of being someone’s best friend. These daydreams were nothing special; I expect there are millions of kids around the world nursing these exact same daydreams at this very second. What made them special to me was that they were secret. If my schoolmates had been able to see these hyperactive Technicolor filmstrips flashing through my brain, I would have died of shame; keeping my daydreams secret meant that I could revel in seeing visions of alternate realities and possible futures that those around me were not privileged to access. In a sense, those mundane childhood daydreams were my first pieces of writing, although I never wrote them down.

Entering adolescence, I began tentatively committing words to paper, in an effort to try to make sense of the flurry of feelings I was experiencing. My feelings at that age largely revolved around boys I had crushes on, authority figures I resented, and symptoms of diseases I fancied I had, so it seemed only natural to keep my writings secret. I went from having a ribcage full of secret daydreams to having a bottom desk drawer crammed with
secret poems.

At times, secrecy seemed a necessary prerequisite for bravery, the bravery to think and write honestly, with an independent mind. Other times, secrecy appeared to be merely an offspring of fear: fear of being rejected, laughed at, psychoanalyzed, pitied. When I submitted my writing to a literary magazine for the first time, I did so in secret, looking back and forth furtively before quickly releasing my carefully spit-sealed envelope into the mailbox’s maw, my face as hot as if I had been helping myself to a handful of the school nurse’s prominently displayed free condoms.

Even after I began accumulating publication credits, I kept my writing vocation a secret from my family and friends for several years. I simply didn’t mention my unconventional pastime to anyone I knew, and since no one reads literary magazines anyway (wink-wink at my fellow travelers on the literary path!), the fact that I was a writer flew beneath my acquaintances’ radar for far longer than you would think possible in this era where Google
knows everything. Only when my first book, Six Rivers, was published did I finally come out of the literary closet. This abrupt discarding of secrecy shook up my inner ecosystem like the introduction of a predatory carp species into a Northwoods lake: for one deranged instant, I even wondered whether it was the cozy knowledge of having a secret that I had loved the most about being a writer, or was it the actual writing?

Today, five years after my first book’s publication and four months after the publication of my second, A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora, I still feel a teensy bit uncomfortable about being the public face of my own writing. In this age where she who conquereth Twitter and Tumblr ruleth the world, I’m that dunce in the back of the classroom hastily looking up “brand building” on Wikipedia. Living openly and authentically as a writer is invigorating but also rather like being the spokesperson for one’s own cereal brand: Don’t look at me; focus on the flavor of those cornflakes I’ve placed before you. I put my soul into growing those grains, and trust me, that bowl’s sweeter than I am.

Jenna Lê is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Le is a second-generation Vietnamese-American, born and raised just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MD from Columbia University. Learn more at jennalewriting.com.

A Poetry Squawk
By Antoinette Brim
Author of Icarus in Love and Psalm of the Sunflower

I love trash T.V. Not the trash television of Kardashian fame. But, real trash—Flea Market Flip and Antiques Road Show trash—stuff found in dank basements. Stuff that has been polished into its former beauty. Stuff that lends itself to breaking and remaking. It’s about the transformation, whether that transformation happens in the eye of the beholder when Granny’s tea set fetches a king’s ransom or when the transformation is in actuality a physical one, like when the steamer trunk becomes a hipster bar for a NYC apartment. And maybe it’s not just the transformation, but the transformative power that saves these found items from oblivion that most appeals to me. Akin to the collectors who come to these shows clutching their treasures to their chest, I covet found fragments of eavesdropped conversation, bits of Ripley’s Believe It or Not trivia, wisps of song lyric, faded photographs, and newspaper clippings, so sure that some DNA strand of truth resides within them. Perhaps it’s part hoarding and part existentialist crisis. I, myself, am becoming vintage—somewhat chipped and awash in patina, but all the more elegant for the time spent soaking up the dust and worries of the world around me.

Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective. Perhaps, it’s a matter of respecting time—apportioning a while to true observation. Consider the beige pseudo-suede couch by the dumpster. I found it while walking the puppy in the early morning snow. It glowed under the lingering moon and seemed to wantonly collect the confetti of snow that came to rest upon it. And I wondered how long it had been the embrace of comfort for a tired workman or the trampoline for a barefoot toddler before it became the beer-soaked weathered resting place for head-banging coeds. The collector in me couldn’t let it go. I snapped a shot of it and now the couch is ensconced in a mixed media collage with an old clock, a murder of crows, and a haiku on ochre crepe-textured paper.

I am still wondering about the woman with the vacant eyes in the subway, who sang out “Control” every so many beats, allowing us to hear the accompanying Janet Jackson lyrics in our own minds. Her clear peals of declaration flew out and away from her and then returned to her in measured time. This is rolling around in my pocket with the buffalo head nickel I found that same day.

As I get older, I fear loss. Poinsettia painted teacups. Lovers. The B-side of Motown 45s. Bone buttons. Art Deco earrings. The names of ancestors. Addresses. The denim blue skies over the Long Island Sound. One day, someone will toss my place. Send my stuff to thrift shops and libraries. So I bury my treasures in my poems. I trust that archivists will sense them. Excavate them. Curate them. Keep them safe.

Antoinette Brim is the author of the poetry collections Icarus in Love (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Psalm of the Sunflower (Willow Books, 2009). She is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. A printmaker, Brim recently exhibited both poetry and monoprints in Jazz: An exhibition of Poetry, Prints and Photography at the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery in New Haven. Learn more about Antoinette at antoinettebrim.com.

A Poetry Squawk
By Joss Barton
Blogger at New Amurican Gospels and HIV Here & Now

I don’t believe in heaven. I believe that heaven and hell are found right here on this beautiful and terrifying planet. And I believe that we all have the chance to find and fight for our own freedom if we can break down the walls the world uses to entrap our consciousness into paradigms of oppression and isolation. Writing is how I break down the walls built around me as a child growing up in a rural, deeply conservative Christian community. Writing has also been how I’ve coped with six months of intense grief and death. It has been the key to the most somber of houses that has kept me believing that hope may still exist in an incredibly violent world.

My mourning began at dawn in January when I discovered Bryn Kelly had committed suicide. I met Bryn at an LGBTQ writer’s workshop in the summer of 2013 and from that moment we began a friendship grounded in our identities as artists, writers, and as transgender women. Her death was soul shattering because we were again losing a transgender woman to suicide and to the constant psychological and physical violence trans women endure in America where 14 trans women, almost all trans women of color, have already been murdered in the first six months of 2016. Her passing also cut deep because she was a brilliant writer who wrote brutally honest pieces that spoke truth on the pain of living as a poor, HIV+ trans woman, and still found gorgeous love and biting dark humor in all of it. The morning we learned she was gone, I touched base with friends, I sobbed, I read a poem on grief, and I wrote. I cried as I wrote EULOGY, my dedication to Bryn, and although it was intended to honor her memory, much of it was a way for me to process the grief of losing her. I wasn’t alone. Dedication after dedication flowed across my news feed in the first weeks and months after her death from her community and queer family across the country, all of us grappling in the dark house of grief, looking for the light in each other’s words. I contributed again with a much more focused literary analysis of Bryn’s work with THE WORLD IS A VIRUS as a declaration that Bryn’s writing is some of the most essential work on contemporary trans and queer literature. I wrote because the legacies of our queer and trans creatives and artists must be preserved for future generations.

I found myself back inside grief at the end of May as my grandmother entered hospice and slowly began dying from cancer. My grandma always painted. She was the first artist I ever knew, the first I ever loved, and as I watched my mother and my aunt stand vigil over her bed, wetting their mother’s lips with tiny pink spongers and feeding her morphine with syringes, her body slowly starving itself, I thought of how a woman is a tree, and how a tree is a ladder that reaches to the things the world tells us we can’t have. My heart was breaking once again as death made itself at home, and as I held her hand through the night, her unconscious breathing growing deeper and heavier, I watched as a spider crawled across the wall like an omen spinning above her head. I sobbed and screamed and wailed but none of that would end up healing her body or bringing her peace. My aunt set up her tablet in grandma’s room to play a bluegrass gospel radio station as I stroked my grandmother’s arm. A gospel spiritual I recognized from childhood began to play: IT’S SHOUTING TIME IN HEAVEN / A SINNER ONCE LOST IS FOUND / IT’S SHOUTING TIME IN HEAVEN. I grabbed a notepad and a green ink pen and took a moment to walk outside. I sat by my grandmother’s pond and wrote brief memory sketches of her slicing strawberries and cantaloupes, us listening to the sound of locusts during summer evenings at her house, her red hummingbird feeders. She died four days later. I began to tie those green sketches into a memorial poem A TREE IS A LADDER I read while standing in front of my family at her funeral. I still can’t stop hearing the last words she spoke to me: I have such good babies.

A week after the funeral, I gather with 200 of my queer and transgender family for a weekend of camping and floating on the Niangua River outside Lebanon, Missouri. We drink, and dance, and revel with drugs in the woods in a campsite devoted to queer pride and identity. The days and nights blur together until Sunday morning as we board dusty yellow buses packed with coolers and water guns for a day on the water. I sit hung over and tired when I hear the words: GAY BAR, BIGGEST MASS SHOOTING EVER, 50 DEAD. We all look at each other in stunned, numb silence. I try to hold on to the power of the queer love around me for the rest of the day, but the despair begins to grow louder with every minute that passes. I return to Saint Louis to a flood of memes, vigil photos, think pieces, and cable news tickers all detailing the horror of the Pulse Slaughter. I look into queer Latinx and Black faces and I know that once again our black and brown bodies are being slaughtered. The grief is even more overwhelming as it settles into an even deeper well of sadness and despair within me. It begins to feel pointless, trying to survive against a world that constantly wants us erased. I wonder if hoarding two months worth of Ambien would be enough to kill myself. I cry in the middle of the night and tell my grandma how much I miss her. By mid week, the depression locks me in my bed, it now occupies every corner of my body and mind, I try to write but nothing but white space comes through my hands.

By the end of the first week post-Pulse, I have nothing inside me but a deep, seething rage. I go to a local punk show and my body begins to wake with each crashing, pulsating, screaming noise. It sounds like anger and chaos and I recognize it within my bones. I attend a grief-processing event for LGBTQIA folks to talk about Orlando. The despair, the tears, and the rage begin to make sense as the strangers in the room one by one mirror my own pain. We are exhausted by the constant erasure of queer and trans people of color by GAY WHITE INC. We are pissed off that our cisgender and heterosexual allies deflect and distance themselves from our daily suffering. We don’t give a fuck about gun control in a nation where our collective deaths have been called for again and again by Christian theocrats. A beautiful, queer Latinx friend in the room calls bullshit on the white fags holding candles at vigils but keep no Fats, no Femmes, no Latinos, no Asians, no Blacks in their Grindr profiles. I speak Bryn’s name and tell the room that no one seems to give a fuck about us as we slowly die every day from poverty, addiction, and suicide, or when my trans sisters are brutalized and mutilated in the streets. Some of us cry for the loss of yet another sanctuary for queer people of color in a whitewashed gentrified world. Others rail against the violence of assimilation. I read a poem. We snap our fingers, clap our hands, and laugh.

It all begins to sound like a shouting in heaven, glorious and defiant, righteous and subversive, holy and healing.

Joss Barton is a writer, photographer, journalist, and artist documenting queer and trans* life and love in St. Louis. She was a 2013 Fiction Fellow at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging LGBT Writers Retreat and was an exhibition artist for St. Louis Nine Network’s 2015 Public Media Commons Artist Showcase. She is also an alumni of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute and this summer she will be a fellow with Topside Press’ Writing Workshop for Trans Women Writers. Her work has been published by Ethica Press, Vice Magazine, HIV Here & Now, An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color, LOCUSTS: A Post-Queer Nation Zine, and Vetch Poetry: A Transgender Poetry Journal. She blogs at New Amurican Gospels and HIV Here & Now.

A Poetry Squawk
By JP Howard
Author of SAY/MIRROR

It has been six months since my Mama passed away. My debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR, was published last year and explored complexities, as well as joys, of growing up with a Leo diva for a mother. My mother was a successful black runway model in Harlem in the 1950s long before she became a mother, and my book includes some of her vintage modeling photos. Mama’s gorgeous sepia-toned photo on my book cover, a rhinestone-studded smoking pipe confidently dangling from her mouth as she sits in a vintage car, staring seductively at the camera, makes me remember when I first showed her the book in her hospice room last year. Her body was frail, but her mind sharp. She held it in her hands, slowly traced the cover with her thin, wrinkled fingers, then looked up at me with a mischievous smile and said, “Damn, I look good!” We both laughed and I loved that, at 91, she was still a diva.

My book was a small part of a larger memoir project that I had been working on prior to her death, inspired by hundreds of vintage and family photos that Mama had gifted me a few years earlier. I had begun to explore our complicated single Mama/only child relationship in memoir form. After her death, I didn’t know if I would be able to write about Mama again. My entry back to writing about us has been slow and sometimes painful. Initially, I spent days looking through her photos, vacillating between crying and laughing. Some brought unanswered questions or prompted historical research about my family’s longstanding presence in Sugar Hill, Harlem. Hardest to view were childhood photographs of Mama and me.

Ultimately, I discovered a smorgasbord of buried treasures in those gifted photos: that small house in Atlantic City that Mama rented for the two of us for one week each summer, with its pastel-pink walls; a Polaroid shot of Mama and me on the boardwalk in rented bikes, Mama in her colorful dashiki, her huge rhinestone-rimmed sunglasses, dangling silver-sparkly earrings and those chunky high-heeled mules she always wore, with me by her side on a purple bike, a skinny little girl with ponytails and lavender barrettes, always slightly embarrassed by Mama’s flamboyant personality; a weathered photo of six-year old me grinning, front tooth missing, next to my huge doll collection; my favorite photo of teenage me and Mama, beaming in front of our Sugar Hill apartment building, and stiff professional studio shots Mama made me sit for each year. I looked sad and distant in some photos and happy, especially in our summer beach photos, where Mama stayed sober all week. I realize now that those photos, initially a painful reminder of my loss, are really generous gifts, and now writing prompts for my memoir.

I recently wrote a short essay connecting Mama’s death to one of my most painful childhood memories and was encouraged when it was accepted for publication. Losing Mama, yet having this huge gift of photos, has allowed me to reminisce, explore and document, via memoir, both beloved and complicated childhood memories.

JP Howard aka Juliet P. Howard is a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the author of SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System, 2015), a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and a chaplet “bury your love poems here” (Belladonna Collaborative*). JP is a 2016 Lambda Literary Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writers Award winner. JP curates and nurtures Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon  (WWBPS), a forum offering writers at all levels a monthly venue to come together in a positive and supportive space. JP is an alum of the VONA/Voices Writers Workshop, as well as a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging LGBT Voices Poetry Fellow. Her poems and/or essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Apogee Journal, The Feminist Wire, Split this Rock, Nepantla: A Journal for Queer Poets of Color, Muzzle Magazine, PLUCK! Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women, The Best American Poetry Blog, and others. JP holds a BA from Barnard College, an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, and a JD from Brooklyn Law School. You can find her online at jp-howard.com.

Video Commentary by Stephen Lewis
Co-Director, AIDS-Free World

This week at United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York City, member states agreed to ambitious new targets for HIV treatment and prevention. But some countries marred the global harmony by blocking language recognizing the importance of so-called key populations for treating and preventing HIV. In particular, Russia, Iran, Indonesia and a group of Gulf States pushed for silence on the need to repeal discriminatory and punitive laws affecting sex workers, people who use drugs and men who have sex with men.

The international advocacy organization AIDS-Free World offers weekly video commentaries by Stephen Lewis addressing the latest news in global public health. The HIV Here & Now Project is pleased to begin sharing Lewis’s commentaries. This week’s commentary focuses on last week’s UN meeting and the controversy over omitting reference to key populations.

www.aidsfreeworld.org

By CJ Stobinski
Contributing Editor

We cross paths with many soul mates during the hours of our lives. Some are friends, others lovers. Some are strangers we meet in passing at boutique sandwich shops, exchanging words of hope, fear, despair, anxiety, and wisdom, trading stories across generations, helping each other breathe a little easier, a little lighter.

There are the soul mates we count the stars in the sky with, surrounded by cornfields in the country, self-diagnosing our personality disorders and sharing our theories about god and the universe. There are the soul mates we turn to for guidance hours after two pink lines appear on an Ora-Quick test. There are the soul mates you share dreams of living together with on the Rich Coast with toucans and scorpions, and your organic farm. There are the soul mates you chase Four Lokos with hot smoke chilled by Mountain Dew in the bottom of the Zong. There are the soul mates you overhear singing through the bathroom vent, their complete ignorance to the importance of their words two days post-diagnosis. “The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow….

Then, there are the soul mates we live to spend a fleeting moment with; those who upend our hourglass, those who pulverize the calcified stone within.

The miniature shards of immature glass inside my soul had ceased churning. The grains of sand within caked, hardened, solidified in formation at the bottom of my hourglass.

He appeared in the periphery of my vision, the large structured S adorning the tank top showcasing his biceps, barely contained by the olive skin stretching over the myofascia, catching my eye from afar. I circled nearer to him, trading pleasantries one-by-one until I stood before his statuesque presence. Time allowed a brief hello, and trading of Polish ancestries transpired before the whistle sounded. The circle turned to the next introduction.

I caught up to Polish man a few hours later, finding myself immersed in his presence quite immediately. Time stood still as single file, grain after grain, shard after shard, descended into his half. On the edge of my seat, the tip of my tongue, I waited for a chunk of glass, a hard pebble to descend through the ethereal flow, to clog the transfer.

Waiting for him to run, to scatter, sharing anxieties, insecurities, insanities. The purple crystal clasped to the chain encircling his neck vibrated, entrancing, inviting sweetly nearer, as a Magnolia draws a hummingbird or butterfly to its sustenance, its nectar. Hours expired before exhaustion eclipsed our energies, and drove us both to the surrender of slumber.

He laid feet away as he danced in my dreams; dreams I just shared I almost never remember. I tell him when I wake up, I’ll regale him with the story of us in my dreams. Alas, the extent of recall upon emergence into consciousness is vague.

Day and night, his gaze imprisons mine, as I wrangle the urge to unfurl his proboscis from its gray and neon cage, to lap up the nectar trapped within. Transgressing the rules would ban us from returning. Daring to share a late-night kiss over falling water, I feed the breath of life into his soul. The entirety of the hourglass has transferred to the other side, his side. We fight exhaustion later still tonight, basking in one another’s glow, each other’s vibration

We depart each other’s presence the next day, 40 hours having felt as if 40 lifetimes passed, returning to our lives separated by 647 miles. Appearing on my phone not long after are three words I’ve waited the better part of a decade to hear. “I SEE YOU.”

The hourglass is upturned again, and the sand, the immature glass flows effortlessly back to my side. It is light, free-flowing like never before. It is quicksand, and I surrender to its seduction.

In half a heartbeat, the glass could shred my insides with its dangerous beauty, but it could also polish away the scar tissue.

These are the soul mates we wait a lifetime for, to be in their presence fleetingly. Our paths may weave in and out of one another’s life, or we may never lock eyes, or lips again.

But you have gratitude for the gifts they have brought you, for softening you, for what they have shown you by upending your hourglass:

You are awake in an insane world.
They are light.
They are sustenance.
They are nectar.

Learn more about Contributing Editor CJ Stobinski and the rest of Our Team.

A Poetry Squawk
By B.B.P. Hosmillo
Whose work appears in a recent issue of Sundog Lit

Once an American scholar in Japanese Studies shared a Japanese folktale with me:

A woman fell in love with a man and suddenly the year was about the passing of things. Soon her shoulders slowly fell off her body like withered twigs. Not too long after, her entire body dissipated like the sand gathered in the palm somebody finally releases and devoured inevitably by the ever hungry air.

Perhaps one would say this is a way of defining love: self-destructive and heavily controlled by time. Although fundamental in the folktale, love does not invite me to see it for it is not experienced. What I find so visibly arresting here is defiance, the acceptance to lose oneself, to be something else, and only through its altitude I’m enabled to think that love is believable, even if it is not at all actual. In fact, I would like to think that love is the strongest only when it is imagined. Among other things, love imagined as defiance informs my writing.

In 2012, in Singapore, I committed to writing poetry. I began without any idea what I would produce. What I knew exactly was I can only speak through my queerness, what constantly made me feel unrecognizable, illegible. The blank page welcomed me, no matter what. Writing was a way to be fully aware that queerness is an interior structure, something that puts my body and imagination together for collaborative work. It was also a way to discover that queerness is a means to develop an [ins]urgent kind of intimacy. In “Visiting the Island of the Goddess of Democracy,” poet Henry Wei Leung writes, “Did holding hands in the rain change the nature of rain?”

This question suggests the possibility of intimacy in unusual circumstance. Holding hands in the rain is romantic! But far more than this, the question forwards that such possibility when made public is a kind of protest. When I write about two men kissing, I do not just commit to the human lips supposing goodness, but more to the unsettling transformative protocol of intimacy when enacted against the powers which have established the oppressive regimes contradicting queerness. Writing an (ins)urgent intimacy then is most of all a critique of democracy since, as a political framework, democracy is largely a heteropatriarchal (white Anglo-European male-dominated) project.

When asked, once, why I continue writing given that protest is most visible if brought to the street, I said there’s no way I could underestimate the capacity of writing. As I surrender to the promise in/of arranging words, I’m blessed with the spirit of contemplation. Writing is a time when I can be intimate with myself and it is the most meaningful experience I could escort my body and mind to. Born in a postcolonial world where language is multiple and weirdly inflected, I may sound new but I’m already hurt. In addition, whenever I think of my queerness, my illegitimate difference, I think that my body doesn’t belong to me, that my body will never be at peace. This is certainly a perceptual mistake and most probably all those whose bodies are perceived as cultural signs of otherness are victimized by this mental error. But writing is such a liberating choice! Not only that writing sharpens my senses to discern and overcome the failures of heteronormative social reality, it also cleanses, widens my mind to the extent that I could generate inspiration from death or deadly desire, that I could celebrate even loss. I’d like to think that poetry is not only a curator of torment; it also is a school where we learn we are and can be beautiful in spite of ourselves.

B.B.P. Hosmillo is a queer poet of color. Pushcart Prize & two-time Best of the Net nominee, he is the author of The Essential Ruin (forthcoming) & Breed Me: a sentence without a subject (AJAR Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nha Thuyen & Kaitlin Rees. His writing is anthologized in Bettering American Poetry (2016) & has recently appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal,  Transnational Literature, & minor literature[s], amongst others. With Cyril Wong, Hendri Yulius, J. Pilapil Jacobo, & Pang Khee Teik, he co-edits Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art. He is also a guest poetry editor at Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, a Hong Kong-based English publication co-founded by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming & Jeff Zroback. Contact him at bryphosmillo@yahoo.com.

A Poetry Squawk
By Phillip B. Williams
Author of Thief in the Interior

Writing a craft essay is difficult because the idea of craft, for me, stems from a kind of magic paired with intelligence. There is as much inexplicability in craft as there is measurable rationale and that is what interests me the most: not always knowing at what time which is consciously activated. So a craft essay is reverse alchemy, making gold into lead.

I suppose one way to tackle this is simply to close read a poem. I chose “cutting greens,” by Lucille Clifton to look not for answers but for more questions, more fodder for my curiosity.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

It’s good to start with the basic structure: fifteen lines split into two sections where lines 1-7 introduce both the task at hand (cutting greens) and the psychological moment (“thinking of everything but kinship”), describing the greens in an erotic way both in relation to the speaker’s “kissmaking hand” and to the “collard and kale/ [straining] against each strange other,” to the last set of lines 8-15 where objects in the kitchen are described by color and immediately after the kitchen itself morphs by twisting “dark on its spine” that leaves the speaker, too, changed.

What’s dope about this poem is the simple language used to describe something so complex and it’s pulled of through juxtapositions and timing. The verbs are active and related by how they describe the tactile, the fleshy, the proximal. We have “curling” paired with the preposition “around” so that we feel the curling is not necessarily a solitudinous positioning as in to curl into one’s self. To curl around means something or someone else is present in order to be acted upon. So the verb phrase also performs a bit adjectivally.

In line 2 we get the verb “hold” and the description “obscene embrace,” giving us more intimacy, more of a lean into the shameful or maybe simply an elevated self-consciousness of sensuality, and showing the speaker as manipulator of the situation. When in line 3 we’re told the speaker is “thinking of everything but kinship,” we have even more evidence that this closeness is not about family or even friendship. The bond is other.

But (and I am skipping a lot of analysis here for sake of space), even the erotic is too simple. The speaker is too in control for the first half of the poem (“curling […]/ i hold,” “my kissmaking hand”). It is important to know that for something to be erotic it must not forced but shared, so this manipulation so to speak is a kind of violence and is lewd (“obscene embrace”) because it is forced.

It’s not until the last half of the poem that we see how complicated this becomes where everything is “black,” even the speaker’s hand, and it is at that moment where the environment itself morphs and it does so because the body within the environment has been made known by the speaker. It is the black hand, which looks like the black pot and the black cutting board that are both tools to break down the greens, that triggers the transformation and heightens the speaker’s awareness, “and just for a minute/ the greens roll black under the knife,” while the speaker is still cutting the greens, still enforcing an anti-erotic but now that enforcement is reflected back by nature of a shared adjectival positioning: blackness.

By the time the poem gets to the final three lines readers have been made susceptible to two manipulations/metamorphoses, one forced upon the greens and the other happening to the speaker.
The final transformation happens to the kitchen, the location in which the poem takes place and arguably the body of the poem (“and the kitchen twists dark on its spine”). By giving the kitchen a twisting spine it echoes back to the curling of the greens, thus giving the impression that the kitchen is also being manipulated, being transformed by some outside force that we find out is the actual appetite of the speaker:

“and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.”

Here, the word bond is tricky. Its positive connotation of an amiable relationship has the ability to dismantle its denotation that means link or tie. If the natural appetite is to control, to manipulate, to enact power—then the bond of live things everywhere is to be either in control or controlled. That’s a possibility. It is also possible that the word “bond” is used here to mean promise or oath, which means it is our oath to undo each other in “obscene” ways. That’s another possibility. And of course the idea of “cutting greens” has with it the southern and the racial, so what does this poem say about intracommunal (how entities within a community operate among each other) or intrapersonal (how a self speaks to and considers itself) power dynamics? How does on affect the other?

And too what is a poem but a power struggle between the writer and their imagination? And once the poem is completed, which it never is, isn’t it the imagination who comes out victorious?