Three poems
For about three months, maybe more, I was writing a poem every day. More specifically, I was trying to get good at poetry, a sentiment that's vital to my being but that makes other poets broadly suspicious of me. I stopped for a variety of reasons. The simplest is that I moved on to the masochistically difficult task of trying to rewrite poems from memory, and that was too psychically taxing alongside the 9-to-5 and thesis work.
But the more piercing reason is that I had an unhealthy attachment to the idea of being published. Maybe that sounds shallow or cynical, but in my defense my delusion is less that I'll get rich off poetry (lol) and more that the conversation would be better with more of my voice in it. At any rate, that hasn't happened. While I'm proud of the work I've gotten published, it doesn't represent me, and it's certainly not moving the game forward. Through a combination of taste mismatch and skill issue on my part, if you looked just at my formal publication history I come off as a dollar-store Ocean Vuong instead of a first-rate version of myself.
I'd like to get back into my little "getting good" routine, because getting good at poetry was personally fulfilling. (Plus, having a habit is good for your sleep schedule.) That means shaking off my cruel-optimistic attachment to getting published, and to hoarding my art like a dragon so it remains theoretically publishable. Did I mention that this attachment is unhealthy? The comparison that comes to mind is cigarettes. I felt like I couldn't quit the ecosystem, and they were killing me faster in the name of making me look cool.
All of which is to say, because I'm trying to escape publication samsara, I can share my work now. So here are three poems from my archive of daily drills. Bon appetit.
Procession
"How long have people thought about the present as having weight?"
—Lauren Berlant
His head up from the water
panting salt brine, spitting,
pearl too smooth and slick
slipping from his clutch.
How hard could it be, O Orpheus,
to just gouge your eyes out?
One of them did. He lived,
heard a starving bat
chase its echo to death.
That's the moral of his myth.
A queue of failed Orpheuses,
masses who died before looking back,
stories as terse as promises
on the backs of books.
The first Orpheus rose from a hell
made of 70% water, singing all the way,
died of a pickled throat.
The second stayed mute.
He breached without Eurydice.
The first Helen made herself a floating
castle on the Mediterranean, drifted
from the Trojan War into serenity.
But prophecy be damned she looked
just once when the sea was clear as mirrors,
beheld her beauty, launched
the thousand ships beneath her feet,
fell into the wake.
Her double-bind,
one in each lung,
tied her
forever to that faraway sea,
fire-pink in sunset.
The eighth Orpheus choked on hell-fumes.
The ninth held his breath the rest of his life.
He survived the myth, choked on.
He lived miserably, but not enough.
If Barbies had Barbies
Median Voter Barbie is a nice
sociologically demure
type, well enough off,
prefab panacea to kids
that need escape, from
hungry household
or affluent boredom.
Well enough off that when
mother bought her a Barbie,
she skipped the clearance rack whereupon
six fellow Median Voter Barbies in damaged boxes
wasted away in eternal brunch,
instead coming home with a
Transfemme Sex Worker Barbie
lauded for its sensitivity consulting,
a deluxe edition including
kneesocks
and crop tops
and a Blahaj
and a Nikon
and half a degree,
and a stick-on womb tattoo
and a collectible pronoun pin,
and a one-sixteenth-scale
Median Voter Barbie.
A graveyard for bottles
And this one overflows with vapid clear
liquid, the bottle Dad swaddles.
The bag creaks with further clinking sounds.
When you're a kid, you assume there's a bottle store
and beg your dad to play Jobs.
His breath smells like baking bread.
What did that other kid mean by
"ancient Indian burial grounds"? (I'm clueless
about the existence of race or death.) Dad
changes the subject, says
this playground was built over a landfill.
He jokes we can start on the next one, hands me
an individually-packaged brownie.
& when the world is driven to eternal play
to cover all the sharp glass things...