December 24th: Poem 'Plosion

 

MY SWAGGER

  Mary Biddinger 

More like a gun than an anchor, a revolver,

the loop they played to make it sound like a diner

in the studio, the entire neighborhood, one guy’s shirt

causing chaos around the corner, debasing the sky

of its antique linens, the kind that bragged how many

once inched across then reconsidered, rolled over

the way that I don’t allow you, so flip the light off

in the birdhouse before mathematics destroy us,

pluck our rivets, and you say there’s this place on my

neck, it’s a tragedy, and the neck is not yours but

mine, not that we have territories, that’s artificial,

unsexy, and when they talk about us it’s mostly me

talking back, and so what, because I once crossed

a river that would’ve kept me forever, and I declined.

                                   one takes one’s place     in a pose

                                                   Aby Kaupang

another has vacated     one is

birthed     by lending forms

to the forces of one’s birth

one’s birth is form      filled in & died in

every beginning then requires a smudging

a giving off of the pelt      near the seem

a new glass      for the squinting of the eye

 Nothingness      wrapped us in cord      new skins & gave

a place for ritual     a body crossable      a border crossed    

{we are afraid too     of finding

astonishment unsurpassable

like joy—total and totally new}

Toss the Famous Person Cards Into the Fireplace

   Becca Klaver

the family

reenacts

its one

sublime &

one terrible

memory

they have

always

refused

the right

words for

things

hot-poke

each other

for lilting

TV voices

for trying

to fade out

into a

real world

decked in

any frock

that 

belongs

Montage Our Way through Winter

    Krystal Languell

I'll use my get out of jail free card

and my good credit. A stranger

called me a whore in the subway

I saw a rat I got lonely I bought shoes

and ate ice cream I drank all the coffee

so I made more and I slept it all off.

I didn't talk to you all day. If we

montage our way through winter,

I can wear my Little House on

the Prairie boots while we pretend

we do real work like chopping wood

or boiling pails of water, and I'll lift

my skirt to step over a puddle just

for the ceremony. There will be

moody string music, no voice-over; 

the audience will see my hair go a little gray.

Would you like to be a power couple?

Come spring, we could arrive in any new town

and between your neckties and my rhetoric,

we could run a successful mayoral campaign.

Lullaby

Dana Teen Lomax

The directive as

I remember it
was to yell epithets
at a tree
and stand back
to watch the results
keeping an eye on
limbs & leaves
the surrounding grasses
any change in light
to take in a reaction
            projections, reactivity           
            so many wars diverted

[mary is pregnant when]

  Pattie McCarthy

mary is pregnant when  the mayflower 

leaves leiden  mary gives 

birth to a stillborn son  only ten months 

after burying  an unnamed child 

   mary gives 

birth to a stillborn son  while still at anchor 

in plymouth harbor friday   22 december 

1620   mary already 

has two daughters named mary & remember 

mary dies that first winter  (her husband later 

marries mary's    daughter fear)       her daughter 

 mary  dies at 83      the last surviving 

mayflower passenger 

mary  a child   four         the product 

an adulterous relationship  is placed 

under the care of  mary  mother of love & wrestling & 

fear & patience   mary 

(a child)              dies   that first winter 

mary whose father died  in provincetown 

harbor  becomes an orphan that 

first winter  mary an orphan of fourteen 

pressure to marry  six eligible 

men for every  woman & girl   after 

   that first winter 

the only other      mary on board dies 

soon after her husband  died 

Christmas in Norway

     Sarah Sarai

Nora the door-slammer
knows every ridge of
Torvald's thumb.A regular Sacajawea
is she, tracking
her way from out under. 

Ahead a few steps, a thoroughly nice woman,
thoroughly my age
calls watch outs for cars
and slush. Thank you, Sacajawea.
She laughs.  How many years
since I heard Sacajawea,
Lewis and Clark, Torvald.
I'm not well-researched.

I'm lazy.

What I know for sure is old.
Ibsen wrote a great scene.
I have a decent hold on
western culture against
much of which

I'd like to slam a door.

Little's known of
Sacajawea's life after Lewis and
Clark opened up the west,
so rich in natural assets.

Golem
  Jessica Smith

Mary Biddinger on Banana Yoshimoto

Mary Biddinger is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Laurel Review, North American Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and many other journals. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the independent literary magazine Barn Owl Review. She teaches at the University of Akron and is the new director of the NEOMFA. She blogs at The Word Cage.



Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto
translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich
Grove Press 2002

Six words that describe this book: Japan, seaside, family, memory, intrigue, endings/beginnings (that’s one word, right?)

When I first read this book, I became startled when anyone spoke to me. Yoshimoto’s prose enters the reader imperceptibly, giving the sense that someone is whispering the story into your ear.

When I finished this book, I immediately reread the last third of it. I was not ready to let go. I’m still not ready to let go.

This book will make you hungry for things you never knew existed, and will put the uncanny echo of ocean waves in your head.

This book transports you to the seaside, even if you are thousands of miles from the shore.

This book is a pickled vegetable, the kind consumed by Yoshimoto’s characters. Impossible to judge through the packaging, vibrant when experienced, striking in its lasting impression.

A favorite quote from book:

The rocky shore was lined with little stands and shops that only stayed open for the summer. They were all boarded up, with an aura of emptiness about them that made you think of ghosts. Way out in the water the flags on the buoys were swaying vigorously back and forth, in time with the roar of the waves. The slight nip in the wind cooled our burning cheeks. We all bought sodas. The clunking of the vending machine in the night seemed to send a shiver of surprise across the entire pitch-black expanse of the beach.

Deviant Beach Reads

For all of us who learned, in retrospect, that a particular summer was the best summer ever, Banana Yoshimoto offers Goodbye Tsugumi, a novel of deceptive simplicity and lively intrigue. Like all of Yoshimoto’s novels, the world of Goodbye Tsugumi is strikingly real, even if the reader has never visited the Japanese seaside that serves both as backdrop and character. The protagonist of the novel is Maria, daughter of a single mother and a father who has just divorced his longtime wife. Upon leaving her seaside resort town home for the bustle of Tokyo, where her family will at long last be complete, Maria realizes how much she values not only the landscape and spirit of her hometown, but her enigmatic cousin, Tsugumi. Half sickly waif, half hell-in-a-handbasket, Tsugumi smashes onto the scene with a foul mouth, a penchant for cruelty, and a weakness for newcomer Kyōichi. As Maria returns for one final summer by the sea, Goodbye Tsugumi chronicles a last chance at reconnecting with family before adulthood fully sets in, with unforgettable characters as our guide. Always atmospheric and never dull, Yoshimoto’s prose is the ideal beach read to lose yourself in. Prepare to be hooked, and stash a copy of Kitchen, NP, or Lizard in your beach bag just in case.

How I Learned Feminism Wasn’t for Me, and Then Learned Better by Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger used to be a nineteen-year-old undergraduate from the Midwest. She is now the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Laurel Review, North American Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Third Coast, Passages North, and many other journals. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the independent literary magazine Barn Owl Review. She teaches at the University of Akron and is the new director of the NEOMFA. She blogs at The Word Cage.


Begin with a nineteen-year-old undergraduate from the Midwest. Shave half her head. Slip with the clippers and shave more of her head. Make her hair a screeching faux platinum blonde. Put a tube of black lipstick in her hand. Watch her peer into the reflective side window of a Trans Am and glide the lipstick on. She can make a cat-eye flip with liquid eyeliner, but today she isn’t wearing any. Stand her on the stairs of the library. Not the eyesore undergraduate one, but the graduate library. She always liked that library best. Back up. Look her over. She’s wearing combat boots from the surplus store. That’s not her daddy’s flannel. It’s 1993. Her headphones are enormous by today’s standards, but nothing’s weighing her down. She feels entitled to her place on these steps. She’d lie down on them if she could, and sleep.

Flash back ten years, and she is wrestling the neighborhood boys on a patch of burned Chicago grass. Put all of the hair back on her head. Replace those combat boots with Mary Janes. Add to the scene a feminist mother, only twenty years her daughter’s senior. The girl and her mother drink plenty of Tab cola, but they don’t eat California grapes. Add to the scene a Catholic school uniform. The girl and her mother pray for a woman priest some day. Out of frame, there’s a father who travels. The girl has a talent for replacing fuses when he’s gone. A house just like all the other brick houses on the block. Knee socks that never stay up. A sense of being able to do anything, but the luxury of not having to worry about doing anything just yet.

Return to the nineteen-year-old undergraduate from the Midwest. She sits in the front row of the classroom. She signed up for this class because she knew it would be for her. Or, because she had something to say. Or, because her university was known for the subject. Or, to fill a requirement. She did the reading last night, even purchased the recommended copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which she was too squeamish to add to her bookshelf, but will nonetheless find rather useful later in life. She does not own a CHOICE t-shirt like some of her classmates, and back at home there are brochures of shattered fetuses under her bed. She never had the desire to pass them out to friends, but felt strange throwing them away. Under the bed there’s also a Hershey bar that someone gave to her, and that she never bothered to eat. When a classmate brings an RU-486 pill to class one day, she gazes at it like a neon pebble.

Add to the scene one teaching assistant who believes that women who color their hair and wear makeup are submitting to the patriarchy, regardless of their intrinsic ass-kicking qualities and feminist allegiances. The teaching assistant does not assert that some might consider it impossible for one to be a feminist if she bleaches her hair and/or wears lipstick. The teaching assistant makes it a mandate. The teaching assistant wants a hamburger when she has her period. The teaching assistant takes a half-hearted stance against the necessity of underwear, but withdraws the statement when scrutinized. The teaching assistant poses an endless series of questions to the one male student in the class. She writes some words on the board, then underlines them. The students want to run down the hall and wash their faces, shave their heads, fling their undergarments out the window, generate profuse armpit hair, and grill hamburgers for all. The one male student in the class produces from his pocket a deus ex machina in the form of a RU-486 pill, and everything is thrown off topic. The teaching assistant does not, thankfully, insist that he take the RU-486 while everyone monitors him for progress.

Return to the nineteen-year-old undergraduate from the Midwest. This year she’ll skip Take Back the Night. Instead, she’ll run around campus with three different knives in her jacket, hoping to bring her own brand of vigilante justice to the town serial rapist. She’ll never take another Women’s Studies class again, instead deciding to write poems. She’ll go to graduate school and make jokes about feminist theory. Oh heavens to Betsy! He’s objectifying her, and she’s internalizing it! She’ll get in fistfights in nightclubs and win. She’ll write poems about getting in fistfights in nightclubs and winning. She’ll become a mother, and a professor, and a mother again. She’ll teach a Women Writers lit course and it will all come back to her when writing her syllabus. She promises a class that won’t bash men. A class that never doubts the necessity of undergarments, where women can show up in wigs and fake eyelashes and body glitter, and men can, too, if they wish. But on the first day when a freshman student mentions that she’s not a feminist, and what the heck’s up with feminism anyway, the no-longer-nineteen-year-old will bristle.

Go back to 1993, and the front row of the classroom. The teaching assistant is asking if there are any questions. The nineteen-year-old undergraduate is contemplating the RU-486 pill, wondering how it would look if mounted inside a crystal and hung from a chain around her neck. Would it be a feminist statement, or would she be submitting to the patriarchy yet again? The teaching assistant is still asking if there are any questions. The nineteen-year-old undergraduate holds on to the RU-486 pill, mesmerized by its glossy finish. Does she begin to feel cramps, as if merely touching the pill has inspired her own uterus to protest, or at least to demand a double quarter pounder with cheese? Does her hand dart up, or does she leap to her combat boot feet and pump her fist in the air, demanding an apology?

No. The nineteen-year-old undergraduate rifles around in her backpack and produces a tube of black lipstick. She wishes that the RU-486 pill could double as a mirror, but instead decides to wing it. She drags the lipstick across her bottom lip, then merges the bottom lip with the top. She contemplates blowing the teaching assistant a kiss, but thinks better of it. Twenty minutes later she’ll be climbing the steps of the graduate library. She feels entitled to her place on those steps. She’d lie down on them if she could, and sleep.