More Sonnets from the Portuguese by Janet C.M. Eldred

Janet C. M. Eldred
More Sonnets from the Portuguese 

Whitepoint Press 
https://whitepointpress.com/our-books/


By the numbers 

ISBN 1944856064 
Publication: 2016
Total pages: 86 
Number of poems: 52

I met Jane C. M. Eldred in a 24PearlStreet class. She was working on what she called a  "longish sonnet sequence" that intrigued me. When her publisher asked  me to review More Sonnets from the Portuguese, I was excited to see the completed project. While Janet has other works of prose, this is her first book of poetry.

 —Nancy Chen Long

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Janet C. M. Eldred grew up in California's San Joaquin Valley. She is currently Chellgren Professor at the University of Kentucky where she teaches creative nonfiction, editing, and literature in the English Department. She is the author of Sentimental Attachments (Heinemann, 2005), a volume of creative nonfiction, and Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), a look into the editing practices and editorial secrets of The New Yorker magazine.

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Janet C. M. Eldred's first book of poetry More Sonnets from the Portuguese is a story-in-verse, a book of sonnets that chronicles the rekindling of an old romance that occurs when two college lovers find each again on the internet. The title and premise of the book are inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous book of love poems Sonnets from the Portuguese. Browning began the sonnet sequence while she and Robert Browning, who would later be her husband, were courting. Robert's nickname for Elizabeth was "little Portuguese," hence the title of her book Sonnets from the Portuguese. While there was nothing really "Portuguese" about Browning's book, in Eldred's book, the main character, Zélia Nunes,  is an Azorean-American widow who lives in California’s San Joaquin Valley who is learning to speak Portuguese.

The sonnets in More Sonnets from the Portuguese are cast in traditional forms and rhyme schemes as well as unconventional ones. Take for example "And Yonder Break," a thirteen-line sonnet that is a text-message exchange between the two lovers, complete with the lines being placed in message bubbles. The poems read as dramatic monologues that make use of apostrophe—Zélia addresses her lover who is not actually there. In the monologues, Eldred skillfully includes specifics that flesh out the lives of the lovers, offering quick details for context. For example, in the first poem "I am a Sensible Woman," we learn some basic facts about  Zélia: 

I Am a Sensible Woman

I—Zélia Nunes— sensibly married
only once. Forty-five, no longer young.
Husband dead, four children, mortgaged, harried.
Holy obligations met, even sung.
Dinner cooked. Children washed. The laundry hung.
The me that was long before is ferried
through the rank weeds of troubles—piled, carried,
dumped in a heap with diapers and dung.

At end of day I fall asleep, buried,
in a life first quarried, then washed and wrung,
stacked, in no particular way, varied.
The children cry out, a hard burst of lung.
          At night, under cover, I conjure you.
          At daybreak I awake, dressed, blessed with dew.

And in the poem "Nacre," we learn of a miscarriage ("When I lost what was left of you—boy? girl? all /  these years—does it matter that I, you, never / knew?")  Eldred also offers details about Zélia's lover as well. We read that he is now is a "VP in the Valley of Silicon" ("Don't Look Back") who is Indian ("Portuguese and Indian can and do mix," "Learning Our History") and that he is currently married ("Of course I have a crush / on you—or would, if you weren’t so well married," "Flashing.")

More Sonnets from the Portuguese is divided into six named sections. Each section title has the word time in it, for example the first section is titled "Resurrection and the Time of Speaking in Tongues." As that section title suggests, Eldred blends the sacred and the carnal in these poems. The blending of the two is a binding theme of the book. For example, in the poem "The Confessional,"  after an intimate encounter ("no / separation now. Together we make / sounds, old and familiar, until new ones come") that occurs either in her imagination or in real life, Zélia proclaims:

I confessed you years ago. What is there
to whisper now for partial indulgence?
Only this blasphemous sin: You have become
my priest, my confessor. I finger
my beads, count so many Our Fathers, so
many Hail Marys. No absolution.

The book also lingers a bit in Zélia's childhood. The second section titled "Extraordinary Time" contains a sequence of poems that are an extended treatment her father and the family's pet rabbits. This sequence turns on the motifs of death and of heat and thirst, for example in the poem "Animal Husbandry" Zélia shares that her father "grew up on a small farm, poor. He knew what to feed rabbits," but that, after moving from the Azores, he "didn't anticipate how [the rabbits] would suffer in San Joaquin heat" ("Holding the Quick Shiver.")  Another  poem in this sequence, "I Have Always Been Careless," demonstrates Eldred's skill with image and juxtaposition. She deftly brings the narrative arc from that of her childhood and father back to the love story by juxtaposing a scene of rabbits, death, heat, and thirst with a scene of  her lover in the shower. In the poem (which you can read here), the first stanza concerns Zélia's rabbit who was convulsing, dying from thirst, and her father's quick action in what could be read as a mercy killing. In the second stanza, Zélia's lover is in the shower with her. Eldred establishes a compelling parallelism between the rabbit scene and the shower scene. Both stanzas have someone with ample water and someone who thirsts. Both stanzas have someone who is careless and someone who suffers from neglect due to the carelessness: In the first stanza (the dying rabbit scene), Zélia is the one with ample water (“the city pool”) and the rabbit is the one who is dehydrated (“his bowl / of water dry”). In the first stanza, it is Zélia who is careless and the rabbit who suffers from neglect. However, in the second stanza (the shower scene), it is the lover who has the ample water ("cool water flowing," "shower") and Zélia who is dehydrated ("I thirst"). This sets up a parallelism which transfers the attribute of carelessness to the lover (the one with water) and the expectation of suffering to the narrator, Zélia. In the final couplet "My dear, you probably shouldn’t be / in my shower, yet through some grace, you are," the word grace hints at something positive and uplifting. However, since Zélia's lover is not actually there at this point, it makes the poem more poignant, as if the water were a mirage, as if her lover and/or their love were a mirage as well.

In addition to death, heat, and thirst, other motifs in the book include fire, destruction, husbandry, and one that I find especially intriguing—technology. Technology is critical to the story, since the lovers reconnect online.  References to technology are peppered throughout the book. For example, the poem mentioned earlier, "And Yonder Breaks," is made up entirely of texts. Poems mention social media, e.g., "photoshopped Facebook fluff" ("You Knew Me Then")  and "an admirer on Twitter who goes un-blocked, unfollowed ... A mere Facebook friend can leave a trace" ("If a Tree Falls in the Forest... .") There are references to computers and hardware, e.g. "I am officially a Kindle / girl—I just bought one—" ("Kindling") and "the bright LEDs of a Silicon Valley night" ("Steadfast.") One poem even involves an online game: "I want to warn / you, Hug your loved ones. Beware the cyber / Day of Zélia’s Warning, the public scorn." ("Day of Zélia’s Warning" is name of a holiday in Elanthia, an online world of the medieval fantasy game called DragonRealms.) While Eldred applies the sonnet form to the classic subject of love, the generous inclusion of technology lends a decidedly contemporary quality to the poems.

The theme of religion threads the book together not only in diction and imagery, but in structure as well. There are 52 poems, completing a liturgical year. There are six sections, each of which can be mapped to six seasons in the Catholic Church's calendar. The invocation of a liturgical cycle becomes evident in the penultimate section "Ordinary Time." For example, "Fast Tuesday, or or Time to Shatter the Bones," has a strong pre-Lenten feel to it. Fat Tuesday is the last day of Carnival, a celebration that historically includes, in some places, the indulgence of sexual desires. It's the day before the start of Lent—Lent being a time of self-examination and reflection—which can be detected in the reflective tone of the poem, e.g., “I thought of you when my husband was alive. / I felt that certain specific happiness, / one that in some odd way, I could count on.”  At the end of the poem, Zélia tells her lover “it’s time to shatter those bones again, / this time, exhaustively, lovingly.” When taken in light of Lent and the impending crucifixion, those lines about shattering bones suggest a metaphorical gesture to hasten the death the love of the affair: a person’s legs were usually broken after being crucified to speed up their death. 

The liturgical and Lenten emphasis becomes even stronger in the last section titled "The Time of Atonement." That emphasis can be seen in the poem titles themselves, e. g., "Lenten Dreams," "Prayer of the Penitent," "Act of Contrition, "Memorial," "A Ritual for Letting Go," "Liturgical Time." The liturgical calendar is explicitly referenced in the poem "Liturgical Time." (The poem is printed below.) In the poem, the speaker is contrite and proclaims a dependence on grace, living moment to moment through repeating cycles of life, and through the seasons of  Ordinary Time, those enumerated weeks that fall outside the major seasons, suggesting an ordered life of quiet growth and maturation.

More Sonnets from the Portuguese is an ambitious sonnet sequence, given its marriage of the religious and the carnal and its strong parallels to Browning's acclaimed book Sonnets from the Portuguese. Eldred's sonnets are varied and skillful and her ability to maintain a narrative in lyric form is admirable. Her use of playful language and the role she gives to technology bring a freshness to a classic story line.

__________

Liturgical Time
by Janet C. M. Eldred

Again this year the cross is hollow. It’s light
to carry. The words are given as grace,
that I may know how frail I am. White
vapor, our restless aims…Sin’s translucent trace.
I fear I won’t make three Good Friday,
without-you hours in silent reflection.
But maybe, for one hour I can endure, pray,
my pale, pale beat of faith a prediction—

One hour leads to one more uncorrupted
hour until grace leads long hours to days,
to weeks, the cycle uninterrupted
year after year of advent, pain, and praise.
Endure suffering. Rejoice the risen.
Dance in tongues. Ordinary Time again.


"I Am A Sensible Woman" and “Liturgical Time,” © Janet C. M. Eldred More Sonnets from the Portuguese (Whitepoint Press, 2016)

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Nancy Chen Long is a National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow. She is the author of Light Into Bodies (Tampa University Press, forthcoming 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Nancy received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. She lives in south-central Indiana and works at Indiana University.

Pricking by Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello 
Pricking 

Tiger Bark Press
http://www.tigerbarkpress.com/


By the numbers 

ISBN: 978-0-997-63051-0 
Publication: 2016 
Total pages: 74
Number of poems: 69

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Pricking is Jessica Cuello's first full-length manuscript. Her second collection, Hunt, was the winner of The 2016 Washington Prize from The Word Works and will appear in March 2017. She is also the author of the chapbooks My Father’s Bargain (Finishing Line Press 2015), By Fire (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and Curie (Kattywompus Press 2011). She was the winner of The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize and the recipient of the 2014 Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. Jessica was selected as a Juried Fellow by the Saltonstall Foundation.

I interviewed Jessica on my personal blog last year about her chapbook My Father's Bargain. You can read that interview here.

—Nancy Chen Long

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Jessica Cuello's first book Pricking is titled after the act of pricking, a method of witch-hunting in the Middle Ages. Suspects, usually women, were forced to strip naked, while witch-hunters, usually men, pricked the marks on their body—birthmarks, moles, pimples. If the hunter found a spot that didn't bleed, the suspect was declared a witch. Using special needles, these often-times paid hunters would prick and prick until they found a spot that didn’t bleed and would identify that mark as the devil’s mark. The title of the book is indicative of what I sense to be the primary impulse of the book: Woman’s struggle for autonomy over her body, the connection between bodily integrity and empowerment.

The book as a whole is comprised of compressed and spare persona poems that place us smack in the Middle Ages. We find ourselves caught up in the lives of three French women thought to be heretical: Esclarmonde de Foix, Joan of Arc, and a midwife. Through the use of imagination and historical fact, Cuello fleshes out a captivating narrative that brings each woman to life.

There are three sections to the book, one for each woman. The first is in the voice of Esclarmonde de Foix, a prominent leader in Cathar Church in the thirteenth century who was accused of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. The origins of the Inquisition are in Rome’s effort to quash the heretical Cathers, a religious group in the south of France whose practices were believed to contain elements of witchcraft. Esclarmonde had six children and is thought to have turned to Catharism after the death of her husband.

This first section opens with three poems that set the stage for Esclarmonde's rise as a leader of the Cathars. The first poem "The Births: 1186" is about Esclarmonde giving birth to her children and introduces birth as one of the themes of the book. This first poem also signals Esclarmonde's turn towards religion after her sixth child: "After my sixth I locked the door. / ... / The natural world is hard and dirt. / I want to scrape it off my skin." The second and third poems center around her mystical conversion experiences. In "Conversion: May 1204," Esclarmonde begins to hear voices, a whisper that has "no decision it," faint voices that she discovers can't leave, because "they were in the body." While there was indecision in the first conversion poem, the second conversion poem, "Conversion: June 1204," is resolute: "God reversed me. See my legs / jaunt up the hill. / The hot wind is His mouth / around me."

In the remainder of this first section, Cuello's poems propel us forward with Esclarmonde through a Cathar-Catholic debate, the atrocities of the Cathar Wars (aka the Albigensian Crusade), and her life as a fugitive, a time during which she was rarely seen. Throughout this first section, the tone remains even and matter-of-fact in the face of violence, for example "The Foot of Montségur," which depicts the remaining remnant of the Cathars corralled and then burned alive, "All night, sun sets on the town. / Easily they fit us in the circle. / We are the last of us." This section closes with a funeral lament voiced by Esclarmonde for her brother Raymond Roger, a non-Cathar who fought to oppose the crusades:

Planh For My Brother, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix

While I was finding room
to hide refugees and heal the sick
you were present.
We never lacked
for things to do and moved
in the self-importance of our birth.
Once, pinning up my reddish hair
I paused and thought of your boyish head.
We were two foxes
from the last litter of our kind.
Our tongues were South.
When you were before the church
half-dressed and shackled,
I couldn’t look.
The world did not seem
long enough in history.
No, it was done.
Our land. Our tongue.
At the end you said your only wish was
that you’d killed more of them.

The second section of Pricking is set in 15th-century France. Most the poems are in the voice of Joan of Arc, another woman who heard voices and had visions. It's a shorter section comprised of ten poems. Around the time that Joan of Arc lived, there were prophecies that France would be saved by a virgin from Lorraine. The first poem, "Jeanne D’Arc Thinks of Her Virginity" hints at the importance of virginity to her ("a virgin / can prophesy for God"), possibly in light of the prophecies. The poem also suggests that once she becomes a mother, she would (or could) no longer be an instrument of God ("but once / a mother, / nothing else.")

I read the first poem of this section to be at a time when Joan of Arc is still with her mother and father. Earlier in Joan's life, her father had a dream that Joan would go off to war. It was a dream that made him frightened for her. This first poem seems to take place soon after Joan hears her mother say that her father told her brothers he would want Joan drowned if she were to leave for war ("I pretend not to know / that he told my brothers // to drown me.") With respect to timing, the remaining poems in this second section seem to take place during the last two years of her life, that is, the year she spent in prison after her capture in 1430 and the subsequent year when she was on trial for heresy. For example, the second poem "70 Feet Down" is likely about one of her attempted escapes from a tower at Beaurevoir Castle where she was first imprisoned. ("Can you be dropped from the lips of the Lord? / I leapt. The ledge / less certain than the bracing cold.")

The poem "In My Cell" appears to be set during a time when the interrogations for Joan of Arc's trial of witchcraft and heresy were moved to her prison cell. In this poem, we see the return to the of idea of mother in which Joan of Arc is mother to herself:

.... shackled to the wall at night
I dream in silence of Lorraine.

The fields are wide. I hold
my left hand in

my right and kiss
my fingers like a mother.

This reference to being a mother bridges back to the opening poem of this section and suggests that Joan is realizing the end of her prophesy, of her usefulness to God. The idea of mother continues in this section's final poem "Isabelle D’Arc Thinks of Jeanne," which is in the voice of Joan of Arc's mother. Coming as it does after a poem titled "Executioner," we know that Joan of Arc is now dead. It strengthens the poignancy of the poem, a mother bearing the grief of a lost child, as we listen to Isabelle talk to her daughter: "I hear your humming while I work / as if you left it in the timbers of our home." The idea of the child being heard and held within the timbers (walls) of a home presages a metaphor of womb-as-a-room, a metaphor that is introduced in the next section.

The third and final section of the book is set in 1580 during the Reformation and associated witch trials. The poems are told in the voice of a midwife. Unlike the second section, which begins with the speaker not wanting to be a mother, this section opens up stressing the importance of motherhood and birth. In the opening poem, "Midwife," the speaker, who is assisting in a birth, uses room as a metaphor for the womb: "All of us began in a room." Speaking of the woman giving birth, the midwife asks "What room is she?" and answers her own question, an answer which highlights the importance of bearing children during this time period: "Walls that go / when they hold no one."

Even though the first handful of poems in this section are about birth and midwifery, the reader will find herself immersed in death. In this arc of the narrative, the speaker recalls one of her own children, a son who died after nine days ("Nine days. The court / remembers. Even my goat / has babies longer", from the poem "Baby Boy.") In addition, one, possible two of the babies whose birth she attends die ("Sick Infant," "Baptism.") In addition, the speaker becomes a widow ("Widowed Young.")

The story turns once the speaker is widowed: She stands accused of witchcraft, likely due to the death of the babies. At the time of the Reformation, some people drew a connection between midwifery and witchcraft. Midwives were not infrequently prosecuted in church courts for providing charms either to assist the mother in childbirth/ pregnancy or to encourage conception. In the poem "Evidence Before the Court" (see the third poem in the link), the midwife denies that she crafted an aigullette "to take a man away." An aigullette is, among other things, a knotted loop of thread used by midwives and/or witches to cast a spell, either for bareness in the case of women, or impotence in the case of men. Through the skillful use of anaphora ("I never / never" repeated twice), the reader is left wondering if perhaps the speaker has indeed used the aiguillette. In the poem, the allusion to Eve, Original Sin, and the biblical garden ("an apple in my / bucket smelling / of the devil") foregrounds the belief at the time of the inherent evilness of women and the blame of women by the Judeo-Christian church for all ills that beset humanity.

After the accusation of witchcraft, the midwife is subjected to a number of tests: "Lack of Tears (see the fourth poem at the link)," "Pricking Test," "Water Test," and "Fire Test." The tests were nothing less than legalized abuse, sexual violence, and murder. Unfortunately, the midwife meets the fate of many who stood likewise accused—she is found guilty of being a witch ("They found the marks," from the poem "Limbo.") The midwife speaks from beyond the grave in this final poem in an understated tone, with what I read as relief: "How familiar: I won’t belong / to the face that made me. / I won’t belong by living." One leaves this last section feeling the full potency of being accused of, and/or prosecuted for, witchcraft, how potent it was as a tool of intimidation, how effective—almost foolproof—it surely must have been in controlling women and their bodies.

Pricking is a successful first book. Its themes carry the reader through each woman's life and time in history, beginning and ending with birth, mother, and midwifery. The themes of body and agency integrate the poems to form a satisfying whole, from the first section, in which Esclarmonde, in "Material," tells us:

My God had no argument,
he panted through my body
until the body was inward
like the caves: cool, silent.
Until it was as the cliffs...

...until the final poem, "Limbo," in which the midwife "waits with the unsaved babies," her soul in limbo, body-less like the others there, until they are reunited with their bodies at the Resurrection. Cuello's consistent use of an understated tone and her finely-chiseled, spare language serve the poems well by standing in contrast to the violence witnessed in the poems. Cuello's poems bring history to life.

__________

Apprentice
- by Jessica Cuello

Soon she would have learned
to strip the membrane
near the womb.
One finger to set
the labor on.

Then she would have learned
to turn the baby
in the mother’s water.
A sailing planet in her hands.

"Apprentice" and "Planh For My Brother, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix" © Jessica Cuello Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016)

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Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light Into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013.) You’ll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, The Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Superstition Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. nancychenlong.com

BLIGHT, BLIGHT, BLIGHT, RAY OF HOPE by Frank Montesonti

Frank Montesonti
Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope 

Barrow Street Press

http://www.barrowstreet.org/



By the numbers
ISBN ISBN 978-0981987675 
Publication: 2012 
Total pages: 83 
Number of poems: 36

__________

I met Frank Montesonti last spring when he was a featured reader at the First-Sundays Readings and Open-Mic here in Bloomington, Indiana. Frank is a one-time Hooiser who attended Indiana University. He now lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at National University. After hearing him read from his book Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope, I immediately purchased it. After reading the book, I knew I wanted to review it and am delighted to share this review with you here.

Also, I had the opportunity to interview Frank. Click here for the interview and to learn more about him. Frank has since published a second book. It’s a book of erasure titled Hope Tree (HOw to PrunE Fruit TREEs). I’m looking forward to reading it!
—Nancy Chen Long

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Overview

Frank Montesonti’s debut full-length book of poetry Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope has much to recommend it. It's filled with emotionally-charged poems that embody the human condition: ambiguity, ambivalence, the simultaneous holding of contradictions, the greater and lesser strains of beauty that frequently attend sadness. The language is often witty and clever, the tone at times sarcastic or glib. While some of the poems are humorous, taken as a whole, the mood tends to be one of sadness or despair. These are poems that grapple with issues of sobriety, trust, love and not love, God, loneliness, science, and culture, all the while exploring and challenging what we hold to be real.

The title of the book has an exuberant wordiness that brings to mind Walt Whitman. And simply glancing through the book, one can see the celebratory length of the Whitmanian line. Most of the poems lean towards a longer line; some of the poems extend into prose and could be said to approach the lyric essay. Although there are strong prose-like elements in some of the poems, those who are looking for a definitive narrative arc, a straight-forward story, won’t find one. In Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope, there is no unifying narrative that imposes order and creates understanding. Instead, there is much of the postmodern in these poems: an indeterminacy that marshals the reader  into active participation to fill in gaps and craft his own meaning out of the text, notions of hyperreality in which one is unable to tell the difference between reality and a simulation of reality, an emphasis on the visual, the view that language shapes our reality, and a self-reflexivity that highlights its own artificiality, such as a poem that lets the reader know that it knows it’s a poem, at times breaking the fourth wall, in which the speaker of a poem addresses the reader directly.

There is an intriguing disjointedness and fragmentation to Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope—various images, scenes, and language that at first blush might seem unrelated, but collectively form a satisfying whole. I experienced the thirty-six poems, with their varying degrees of disjointedness, like scenes in a movie—not a linear sort of movie, but more like a montage of images and scenes that taken together form a cinematic-like experience. This cinematic thread, which includes film-related diction, references, and allusions, is one of the organizing forces of the book.

Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope is an impressive and poignant book. Satisfying on a first read, it also amply rewards repeated readings. The poems are deeply layered, rich with metaphors, allusions, and multiple meanings. Each time I return to a poem, it's like a present being unwrapped—I discover something new. 

A Closer Look

To give you a better idea of what you might find in Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope, we'll take a mini-tour through it using the cinematic aspect as a map: First, we'll take a brief look at the opening poem, which establishes a cinematic reading of the book. Then we'll turn to one of the prose-like poems, one that involves the film The Wizard of Oz. The third poem we'll look at is one with shorter lines in stanzas; it involves the film It's a Wonderful Life. We'll conclude with the last poem, which reinforces, as well as closes, the cinematic reading.

The first poem of the book, “The Incalculably Long Geometry of Sobriety,” is set in winter ("November always starts out this way"), with a speaker who is wrestling with sobriety ("A week since my last drink. The falling from the high blue"), who is probably in Chicago ("apartment staircases in Chicago.") So within the first few lines, we encounter some of the motifs that help stitch the book together: winter/cold, sobriety, the Midwest, and the color blue. (The full text of this poem can be found in the interview, which is here.)

The book's motifs combine to support its various subjects, and in this first poem, two notable subjects are introduced: loneliness (“O Loneliness. / I love the staged heartbeat of a Coke shouldered from the machine”) and loss:

Out there in the snow is a kid in a blue sweater with a head full of bronze gears
who is trying to grasp the incalculably long geometry
of loss and life. I’ll miss him too.

The various subjects in the book in turn form the foundation for what I believe is the theme of the book: a questioning of reality, an assertion that life feels like an imitation, like something less than. In the third stanza, we encounter the start of the groundwork for that theme and an invitation to a cinematic reading:

                                  … You feel like a movie,
rapping on someone’s door,

then you’re in a movie;
you could swing the camera around and watch the brickwork of snow.

It's likely that the poem is a monologue, so the 'you' in the above snippet is the speaker talking to himself. When the speaker says he feels "like a movie," he could mean that he feels like watching a movie. However, if we let the words stand on their own, he could be saying that he feels like an object...like a movie. When taken together with the line that he's *in* a movie, the speaker calls into question the reality of his life at that moment, and in the doing, he starts the groundwork for the theme.  


The next poem on our brief cinematic mini-tour is “Quitclaim of the Wizard of Oz.” It also questions what we hold to be real. “Quitclaim of the Wizard of Oz” is one of the longer, prose-like poems. In it, Montesonti hijacks the movie The Wizard of Oz and beams it into his own universe. The Wizard appears to be the speaker in the poem. Since a quitclaim is a renunciation of any legal claim to rights, at this point the title seems to suggest that the Wizard has given up his rights to the Land of Oz. The first few sentences of the poem read like a script. The first stanza suggests that the Wizard and Dorothy are not in Oz, but perhaps are in their mutual home state of Kansas or somewhere in the Midwest:

Edge of reaped cornfield. Stood there. Dorothy jump cut-materialized and ran into my arms. “What happened to the scarecrow?” she asked. “You were the scarecrow,” I replied.
“I knew all along,” she said, brushing back her hair.

While the beginning of the first stanza is script-like and suggests a movie, we learn in the second stanza that the Wizard is also talking to someone, a ‘you’, which suggests that the poem is also an epistle or an address to someone who isn't there:

Dear Anonymous, There are small blue tornadoes in my eyes when I read your poems about the outlines of socks on your floor. Your poems entitled “Depression in a Suitcase.”

The specificity of the second stanza—'your' poems, the socks on the floor, stating the poem’s actual title—all point to a particular, known person, despite the Wizard calling that person 'Anonymous'. In addition, the Wizard  seems to know about other poems in this book. For example, the part about the "outlines of socks on your floor" could be a reference to the poem "A Time to Sing in Airports," which comes later in the book and mentions the speaker's socks on the floor. The Wizard ask questions of, and addresses, this anonymous person throughout the poem, for example:

Would you trade your lion for courage?

Dear Anonymous, If I were a soldier I’d be a bad soldier because I wouldn't die for anyone or myself. May I digress? Black T-Bird blacking out. Yellow maple tree unzipped. Mattress, independent on hardwood floor.

…

First you’ll miss banana shakes in the summertime; then you’ll learn we’re voices trapped under language.

…

In the fourth stanza, we learn that the Wizard is also a poet ("the light from the poem I wrote about watermelons") and that the Wizard in this poem-version of the story is probably living with Dorothy ("the artificial womb of the bathtub, Dorothy's bare feet out of cuffed jeans; she sat on the edge of the bed, crossed her legs, and spread out her toes.") Given that the Wizard is a poet, given that the anonymous 'you' is also a poet, given that the Wizard has information about other poems in the book, all of these 'givens' together support the idea that the Wizard is either addressing the poet who wrote the poem, or the Wizard is the poet who wrote the poem. So we have the poet speaking as an alternate version of himself (as the Wizard) and we have the speaker, the Wizard, who is speaking to an alternate or separate version of himself (i.e., the poet). This circularity creates ambiguity with respect to speaker and addressee. It has the effect of conflating the role of the Wizard in this poem-film with the personhood of the poet in 'real life'. What is real merges into make-believe and vice versa.

Before leaving this poem, I'd like to spend some time with the last two stanzas:

This is the talking I find significant, talking more like clothing. The broken, frozen reeds of cornstalks, the pale yellow sun struggling to lower its temperature below the silos.

Would you give it all up to go home?

I want to linger here with the simile "talking more like clothing" because it is a simple example of the richness of Montesonti's metaphors, similes, juxtapositions, and other methods of comparison that transfer meaning and attributes. The simile "talking more like clothing" draws me in as I consider talking that is more like something you slip on and off, as something you can leave in a heap on the floor, or wash clean and put away, talking as something you choose to put on in order to form an identity or project a persona, talking as something you wear to protect yourself from being naked and exposed, talking as something wordless.

Lastly, the question that ends the poem "Would you give it all up to go home?" is an example of the multiple meanings that Montesonti layers into his poems. The landscape depicted in the stanza (the "broken, frozen reeds of cornstalks" and the silos), along with some of the other location-descriptors in the poem, suggest that the Wizard and Dorothy could be back home in Kansas. If they are already in Kansas, then the question at the end of the poem could be asking the Wizard if he would give up what was considered home (Kansas) in order "to go home." In this case, asking the question conveys the feeling that home is wherever he is not. However, in the poem, the Wizard and Dorothy also meander to Greece and possibly to Chicago. If they're not in Kansas and are moving around, then asking the question at the end conveys the feeling that home is unattainable. At the same time, if we read the poem as the poet speaking as the Wizard speaking to the poet, then 'home' takes on a more metaphorical meaning, one that is not necessarily a place.

The third poem on our brief cinematic mini-tour, “A Flock of Iagos Waiting in the Wings," is one of the poems that appears in shorter-lined stanzas and is an excellent example of Montesonti's use of allusion, ambiguity, and juxtaposition. First, the title. Through the name 'Iago', Montesonti invokes both what some would call high and low culture: Iago in the title alludes to the the charismatically-cloaked Machiavellian character in Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago also alludes to the parrot in Walt Disney’s cartoon TV series and films Aladdin. While both manifestations of Iago have unsavory characteristics, Shakespeare’s Iago is malevolent—Disney’s not so much, more of a trickster character rather than an evil one. If we have in mind Shakespeare’s Iago, it sets the stage for the menacing undercurrent of the poem, especially in connection with the word ‘flock’, which, while meaning a large number, also summons the image of a flock of evil birds. However, if we have in mind Disney’s Iago, then it sets the stage for something comical as we imagine a flock of mischievous cartoon birds. The word 'flock' also hints at a church congregation, giving a slight religious tint to the understanding of the title, an understanding that also presages the biblical references and allusions in the poem.

At the start of the poem, we find the speaker standing on a bridge in Indianapolis “getting covered with coils of snow,” contemplating the 1946 American Christmas movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and the alternate world that would have existed had the main character of the movie, George, never lived—how George’s home town would have ended up “… constricted financially, then choked / out by cheap neon from the luminous / vices.” The image of the speaker of the poem on bridge echoes the scene in the movie where the lead character George stands on a bridge in the snow on Christmas Eve contemplating suicide. The movie title It’s a Wonderful Life takes on a sense of irony as the speaker tells us he “feels like Lucifer in a tree” that this alternate harsh, George-less world would never come to be “just because George renege[d] on his wish” to die.

The speaker's consideration of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life is immediately juxtaposed with science, as the speaker starts talking about a science article: “I read this article / about some scientists who theorized / twenty ways the world might end.” This juxtaposition seems to turn from the elusive fantasy of the movie to hard fact. But that turn turns out to be elusive as well, because according to the speaker, the last scientific theory is that “Someone wakes up / and finds it has all been a dream.” The speaker acknowledges with glib sarcasm: “Yes, this trick / is cheap soap opera tripe, but who says / we live in an expensive universe?” There is humor in this ironic turn to science that really isn’t science, a darker humor rooted in cynicism.

The speaker of the poem continues the extension into science with a story he saw on the science TV program NOVA about a man afflicted with Capgras delusion. The man "believed / all his loved ones were carbon-copy imposters.” The speaker recounts that the man “didn't think his parents / were reptiles in rubber suits or Iagos waiting in the wings ... / they just weren't them.” While the poem says that the parents are not “Iagos waiting in the wings,” the title says the opposite, that this poem is about “a flock of Iagos waiting / in the wings.” Here, we have family members who are not family members, a poem that says the parents are not Iagos waiting in the wings, while title says they are. This sort of ambiguity disorients the reader with respect to what is real and what is not.

On the  heels of the NOVA show, the speaker returns to standing on the bridge, there in the slush of traffic:

I’m not thinking of doing anything drastic;
I'm just watching the light from the nearby power

plant occasionally coil in a divot of water,
shine like a scale, and then disappear.


Those last two stanzas leave the reader with a final imprint of the snake that has been slithering all through this poem in images and allusions—Lucifer, coils of snow, the alternate universe that "like a snake unhinges its jaw"—as well as in diction, for example “constricted,” “snake-oil salesman,” “the brief venom of visual exultation,” “reptiles in rubber suits,” and the "legless" moonlight and snow.

Related to the image of the serpent, one last comment before we move on: Like other poems in the book, this poem contains biblical references and allusions, both directly through Lucifer and indirectly through Iago, which loops in Shakespeare's Othello, considered by some to be an allusion to the biblical creation story in which Desdemona is Eve, Othello is Adam, and Iago, the serpent that deceives them.

We'll conclude our cinematic jaunt through Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope with the last poem of the book, which has the delightful tongue-in-cheek title “Gratuitous Voice-Over at the End of a Film, Reflecting on the Tribulations of the Plot and Coming Finally to an Epiphany.” The poem is told in the first person, and being a voice-over to a film, I imagine the speaker saying the opening lines out loud, as he watches himself row across the lake:

Then I realized, rowing across the lake
that even if Mother leaves the sanitarium
and they build another aviary and free the bullfinches

The humorous tone of the title spills over into the beginning of the poem and those first few lines have the feel of parody. The first twenty-six lines form one long sentence, a string of collaged images and scenes that feel less and less parodical until we reach the final images of that sentence:

winter rain cutting through tree branches,
all this inevitable turning in my life,
a tornado kicking out shreds of a barn,
or an icebreaker ship rolling like an oily bell.

The last six lines of the poem clinch the cinematic reading of the book with a final, parting shot:

It’s as if there’s a camera that pans out farther
and farther until you question what holds it.
Then I realized, rowing across the lake,
there’s so little to keep me from sinking,
just this small craft,
suspended above the consuming water.

This last poem, in which the speaker approaches his life as if it were a film, suggests that life/reality is something we construct, something we can't help but question; it evidences the postmodern container that holds the poems of this beautiful book. 

Like the final poem, the poems in Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope demonstrate a skillful use of tone, juxtaposition, metaphor, and allusion. Montesonti carefully crafts images and language. He is a master of juxtaposition, metaphor, and layered meaning. The result is a book that engages the reader's heart and intellect as it takes us on a journey, an exploration of what is considered real. The book doesn't presume to give answers. Rather, it gifts us with an experience.

__________

[a poem from Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope]

Blackout Chef

I had a friend whose father,
every night after coming home
from looking for work,
would sit down at the kitchen
table and with medical accuracy

pour six shots of vodka
into six glasses and drink them
one per minute. Then he
would stand, open a bottle of wine

and start cooking in his little
basement apartment,
which he rented after the divorce,
until his memory lifted away.

Starved of himself,
he grew so hungry
he would prepare elaborate
meals: New York strip steaks

a perfect medium,
roasted lamb with rosemary
and mint, tomato
and cilantro gazpacho.

He must have staggered through
the bright aisles of the grocery
rooting around the crisper
for kale while Sheryl Crow

played overhead, or slurred to
the manager about the lack
of fresh tarragon. In his bright warm
kitchen with the snow piled

above the basement windows
in the winter months when the sun
would set at five p.m., he pulled his face
from the steam of the pots,

wrinkled in an expression
of joy in preparing things
that made sense, but the next morning,
he would wake to find it all there

untouched, gleaming on plates,
his night work, having appeared seemingly
from nowhere—from someone

who had the things he lacked in life:
taste, inspiration,
the power
to wake up the next morning,

someone else.


"Blackout Chef" was first published in Spork

* * * * *

All poems printed or quoted in this post © Frank Montesonti Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope (Barrow Street Press, 2012)

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Nancy Chen Long received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. Her chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (2013) was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You’ll find her recent and forthcoming work in Sycamore Review, Cold Mountain Review, RHINO, The Louisville Review, Naugatuck River Review, and other journals.

LITANY FOR THE CITY by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman
Litany for the City 

BOA Editions 
http://www.boaeditions.org/ 

By the numbers
ISBN 9781934414804 
Publication: 2012 
Total pages: 80 
Number of poems: 21

__________

I first met Ryan Teitman in 2009 when he was a student attending Indiana University’s MFA program. I'm an admirer of his poetry and when I saw that he had published his first book (a prize-winner no less),  I jumped at the chance to share it with you.  Fortunately, he also agreed to an interview, so click here to read the interview and learn more about this talented poet. He’s definitely one to watch. 

—Nancy Chen Long

__________

Ryan Teitman’s first book of poetry Litany for the City was selected by Jane Hirshfield as the 2012 winner of the A. Pouling, Jr. Poetry Prize, published by BOA Editions. Litany for the City is a meditation on place, the importance of place, the embodiment of place, the conflation of place and body. Teitman provides structure for the reader through the theme of city / place / location—from consideration of a city such as Philedelphia, to a place like that of a dry wheat field (“Ephesians”), to the tender location on the body, a “patch of jawbone hidden by the earlobe” (“Vespers”). In addition, Teitman also provides structure through a number of motifs, most notably that of religion: the title of the book, the title of poems, in diction, and through images.

As counterpoints to such grounding structure, Teitman offers delightful surprises with his images and juxtapositions. For example, we find the jarring image of a syphilitic eye compared to the domestic image of a fig on a breakfast plate (“The Cabinet of Things Swallowed”); there’s the rusted belly of a stove disintegrating into death-cinders right next to birds teeming with life as they build their nests in a copper bowl, the rust-red matte of the stove-belly next to the copper-red shine of the bowl-womb  (“Ars Poetica”).

Litany for the City opens with the poem “Philadelphia, 1976,” an ode of sorts, filled with kaleidoscopic bursts of memory-images, personal, poignant. The title of the poem locates us not only in a geographic place, but also a point-in-time—the bicentennial of the U.S. The title brings with it the historical importance of the Declaration of Independence adopted on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, perhaps establishing a comparison of what the city is now in light of its auspicious beginnings, or perhaps suggesting that change is inevitable in the expanse of time, changes to city, analogous changes to self. What one is in light of what one could be.

“Philadelphia, 1976,” is a list, a litany, of images, each one inviting the reader to linger. The poem is emblematic of the detailed imagery that courses through the poem. In the first stanza, the reader is seduced with sound:

          A still night has its own cruel music:

                       the catch of bridge cables plucked

                                      by stone-scented wind; the low, bent

          hum of the Delaware, rippling like a singing saw.

The images turn more personal, when the speaker tells us, perhaps speaking of himself:

                                      Those are the nights

          when any boy would drop

                         Pabst empties off the Tacony-Palmyra

                                        Bridge, then watch the stars

           strip off their summer dresses and dive naked

            …

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker addresses the reader directly, asking the question “what’s our city made of?” Use of the pronoun “our” brings the reader into the speaker’s intimate circle. The speaker continues his active engagement with the reader, inviting the reader to go with him to the bridge, watch the fireworks, and then, in a sacramental gesture, “let // the spent flakes of soot settle on our eyelids / like wafers of host dropped onto tongues.” Surely, the poem is an ode. It is a meditation. It is a prayer for a beloved city that seems to form a portion of the speaker's sense of self.

The second poem of the collection, “Vespers,” is a narrow poem in couplets, a sensual poem, with its images that linger on the body. The poem opens with an evocative image—the smell of orange: “Peel an orange, set / a candle in the rind.” This first stanza, with its use of the imperative, coaxes the reader into feeling as if s/he were peeling the orange, feeling the press of the wax candle into waxy rind. And, as with the preceding poem, Teitman increases the intimacy with the reader through the first-person plural of “we” when speaking of the moment just before death, and juxtaposing that moment next to the waking moment with lover:

Before we die,

we taste almonds;

we wake to a lover

slipping a tongue

in our ear;

“Vespers” commingles the sacred and the corporeal with “drops of sweat // that slide like rosary beads” and the ending observation that “[f]aith // is tasting flesh / through all coverings,” even “through our thin skin that keeps / all we are from spilling out.” The poem is faithful to its title, befitting a prayer at sunset.

Teitman repeats certain words in "Vespers," e.g., "oil" and "lover." Such repetition of words, images, and motifs is one of the many strengths of this collection and is found not only in a single poem, but throughout the book. For example, let’s look at the first of three “Dear Doctor Franklin” epistolary poems, specifically attending to the repetition of work/traveling to work, sight/light, the imperfections of the body, and the word "press." The poem opens with the speaker writing to Benjamin Franklin, not surprisingly, of invention:

Everything is an invention,

I’ve come to learn. The way we press

into each other on the morning train—

that brush of cloth and wool

that seeps into us like a benediction,

or how the old woman

…

From the image of the morning train and its implied travel to work, the poem returns to the motif of traveling to work, as the old woman waits for a bus, pressing a newspaper “to her face when she thinks no one / is watching,” reminiscing about the smell of the newsprint, how it brings back memories of her work at the printing plant. In fear of stating the obvious, I’ll point out that the pressing of people into the train in the first stanzas becomes the pressing of the newspaper to the old woman’s face as she recalls working at a printing press.

After an image of her work-weary, (ink) “dye-purpled hands”, the poem immediately returns to the motif of watching mentioned above: “I see eyeglasses / on everyone nowadays,” and extends the idea of everyone having a bodily flaw (i.e, everyone needing glasses to see):

It comforts me to know that light

visits us all differently,

that the imprecisions of our bodies

can work on us …

The morning train, which opened the poem reappears: “these mornings—I watch [the city] rattle // in the hand-printed windows / of the train.” And invention resurfaces, again bridging back to the opening stanza: “I want to find the line // where the city becomes the city, / where invention becomes instrument.” Work and train and travel and seeing and light and shadow and city, they checker through the poem, finally ending on sight: “… I see how fragile our eyes will become.”

Like the "Dear Doctor Franklin" poems, "Ephesians" is another epistolary poem. It's also one of a number of prose poems in the collection and is a prime example of Teitman’s careful attention to detail in the flow of images that he crafts. The poem is addressed to “Beloved” and opens with an imperative to “remember what we used to know” followed by a series of startling images: an owl in a barn, perched on a rafter, a kitten in its beak; the speaker and the beloved walking through a field, weathered wheat brittle beneath their feet, and their hands coated with ice-cream; the beloved hatcheting at hives in an apiary, screaming “I am the Lord God of all creation!” That night, after being stung by a hive full of angry bees, the beloved’s father reads fables to (presumably) her, as a doctor wraps honey-dipped bandages around her welts. The speaker then shares an even more startling image:

… You opened your mouth and let the doctor reach in with pliers, let him pull out one bee after another from under your swollen tongue, and let him hold each corpse—glistened with spit—up to the windowpane, before dropping it in a jar by your bedside. You carried that jar with you always, half-filled with their dried bodies, like kernels of corn.

The poem has religious overtones, the title itself bringing into context the Epistle to the Ephesians, a book from the Second Testament. The poem shares a number of characteristics with Epistle to the Ephesians. Of course, both are epistles. In addition, bees feature prominently in the poem, which echoes the importance of bees to the Ephesians. The Ephesians were once devotees of the Greek goddess Artemis, her temple at Ephesus being one of the ‘seven wonders of the ancient world.’ Bees were one of her trademarks: They were included on statues of her, her priestess’ were called bees, and Ephesian coins at one time were stamped with the image of a bee.

In addition, the beloved in the poem repeats a verse from Epistle to the Ephesians, “wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead”(5:14), which is in a section where Paul directs the Ephesians to renounce their pagan ways, to renounce fornication, impurity, and idolatry. The speaker hears the beloved say this verse while she's dreaming, after they'd fallen asleep in the hayloft. When they awake, it appears that the beloved and the speaker have eaten the bees: “In the morning the jar was empty, and our eyes were the color of nectar.” It's an eerie image that suggests the two have taken on the characteristics of what they have consumed. This is perhaps a nod to transubstantiation, the Catholic doctrine that underlies the Eucharist. As one Catholic explains: “Ordinary food is consumed and becomes that which consumes it. In the Eucharist, we consume God and become that which we consume.” What a fascinating possible reading—that the beloved and the speaker have consumed the bees and have either become bee-like or become in the likeness of Artemis.

Along with “Ephesians,” there are a number of other prose poems in the collection, including an ambitious prose-poem sequence called “Metropolitan Suite,” which is in the last section of the book. “Metropolitan Suite” is comprised of fourteen prose-poems, all dealing with “city.” Each prose-poem section contains treatment of specific details, as well as elements that thread throughout the sequence. Take for example the first prose poem in the sequence (which can be read here in the first paragraph.) In this poem, the specific details concern music. The poem opens with a command to “Sing!” A woman plays a mandolin. Men chant. The rousing music of a carousel is at full tilt and the speaker admonishes us to lilt “Yes! Thank God you found it, my treasure, my prize, my jewel of the Americas” when we receive a black umbrella. The poem ends with us hearing the woman, as she sings for days “city, my love.” And in this poem, one of the elements that connects it to other poems is the presence of a museum, “People from across the world came to reclaim their losses from the museum.” The museum here  echoes other poems in the book (e.g., “The Cabinet of Things Swallowed”), as well as other poems in the prose-poem sequence (e.g., “The museum and its wall of eyes” in the third poem of the sequence.)

However, in this first prose-poem in “Metropolitan Suite,” the cherry-on-top for this reader is the surreal feel as we expand from that of a particular city into that of a mythic, universal city: “A woman sits on a statue of Lenin” the speaker tells us, and we think a city in Russia perhaps, or maybe Seattle or possibly Las Vegas or New York City, each with a statue of Lenin. “This is Brotherly Love” the speaker says, and we feel an aspect of Philadelphia enter our understanding. Oh, “[t]his is the City of the Big Shoulders,” the speaker continues, and we weave in the energy of Chicago, and maybe even factor in Carl Sandberg’s poem of the same name, in which the speaker of that poem calls Chicago the "City of the Big Shoulders." A single city setting—a woman sitting on a statue, men chanting from the square, a city with a museum, a river, a city filled with people who have a love of umbrellas. One city that is at the same time a litany of cities that is at the same time the universal city that transcends all cities.

“Metropolitan Suite” is a gift of image and language. And that is how it is with each poem in Teitman’s debut book Litany for the City. Each poem offers something tangible and memorable. Teitman's mindful and creative use of detail, juxtaposition, anaphora, the theme of city, and numerous motifs, creates an engaging world. Filled with finely-chiseled poems that lean toward the lyric, Litany for the City is a compelling read that engages the reader from beginning to end.

*******************

[a poem from Litany for the City]

The City That Swallowed the Sea

I want to forget the city that swallowed the sea,

where the churches unbreak bread and send old men

onto their hymnaled knees, where the streets sing

like handbells and the night cracks like a broken bottle

crushed under the heel of a priest taking confessions,

where the newsmen huddle on a street corner

under evening editions while the rain skins

their stubbled chins and the creeping asphalt

licks at the face of the shoreline still,

sipping at the sea, sipping at the salt

that steams up from the waves each sweaty night

and blankets the shoreline in a tight knit

of creamy silt, and I remember the prayers I said,

with my knees cupped in sand,

how I prayed to the saints for an intercession,

how it came like a punch to the blood,

wrapped its fingers around the throat of my blood,

squeezed the ribs of my blood until I could feel

the nicked edges of broken-blood ribs tickling

my blood's tiny lungs, those neat, unfurled sails tacking up

and down my veins, and I remember the saint

of th e city, our patron and the patron of bookkeepers,

the patron against lead poisoning, the patron of shims

and tambourines, the patron of hiccups and tin whistles,

patron of pandemics and against pandemics,

of ironworkers and against ironworkers, and I want to forget

when I was five, and our teacher told us to draw

a picture of ourselves, and I drew the skyline above the sea,

said I was changing my name to "The City,"

and she leaned in close and said that I would never be

the city that swallowed the sea, and my face

turned warm, and her breath was the dry hush

of the sea as it slides each day from the city,

and we rope it and haul it back like a brindle calf

with three legs tied, and we drink it a little

each day, and the censusman knocks every morning

to measure how much we drank,

and I want to forget our duty to be the city

that swallowed the sea, to be the saints of the c ity

that swallowed the sea, and I want to forget those streets

that ribboned and choked and split my bones,

that sea that skipped down the avenues of my nerves

and planted a kiss on the tin y bronze bell

that hangs—unpolished—from the stem of my brain.

“The City That Swallowed the Sea” was first published in Pleiades.

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Nancy Chen Long lives with her woodsman husband and blue-eyed dog in a small cedar cabin in the forested hills of south-central Indiana. She volunteers with the local Writers Guild, offering free poetry workshops, facilitating creative writing and feedback groups, and assisting with two reading series’—one for prose writers and another for poets. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in RHINO, The Louisville Review, Roanoke Review, Found Poetry Review, and Adanna Literary Journal.