Honestly, I won’t feel the pain of my vanishing because much energy has been expended here on Harriet. I think I’ll look back in a few months and be impressed that I—once a blogger-hater—grew to respect the role and to look forward to writing entries. The convert in me declares: Bloggers rule! Six months of work, and well-spent, I might add. I’m not sure what the generous folks at the Poetry Foundation expected from me, but this is what they got.
My tenure is over, but my work as an activist writer is not done. I’ll still be reviewing two titles a month for my column at The El Paso Times, and I’m going back to reviewing for Luna. I’ll get my blogger on from the National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Mass, where I hope to enter profiles and interviews every month. My angle will be, as per my interests, small press books, poetry titles, and minority and queer writers, but with a slightly different flavor than the one I presented here on Harriet. So check in periodically.
I know that we are offered this forum to chime in whenever we feel the need to, but I think there’s much to be said for moving on. I will not be coming back to Harriet (except as a lurker—this blog is addicting, isn’t it?) because it will no longer be the same place I once knew, and that’s how it should be, always going forward.
Farewell to the bloggers remaining here, Major, Reginald and Daisy, hasta pronto Christian, Stephen and Alice, fellow Harrieteers also moving on, y suerte to the bloggers coming in, whoever they may be. It’s been quite a ride. And much gratitude to the Poetry Foundation, and to Emily and Nick and Don—all gente de aquellas. This space has become more relevant to the poetry community at large in less than a few years than some of the New York-based poetry organizations that been around for nearly a century and yet operate as if we’re still in 1950.
Y mil gracias to the faithful readers, and to those of you who wrote in to comment, even when it was to disagree. Dialogue is healthy. This was an extraordinary opportunity I couldn’t pass up and I hope Harriet will continue to invite the range of personalities, points of view and perspectives, from the political to the problematic, from the friendly to the ferocious. I was simply a small part of something bigger here. Blessings, and may this institution continue to thrive.
Signing off, besos y abrazos, (and in some cases, sombrerazos y zapatazos), and don’t forget to support the rally at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in D.C. this May!
Rigoberto

Carousel
The brutal white horses with painted-on faces
Are riding their circles, riding
Dead air. The dead air is hanging
Is ridden with riders and glued-on red
Saddles. Crumpled hoofs in the dead-on air.
The wild glare of the brutal white horses
And the crippled gold manes tossing
Dead air and the two girls who ride them throwing
Their kisses from high, battered foreheads
Through the thin screams of their stringy red hair.
The brutal white horses are riding their circles,
Veering in terror from painted-on ropes
In dead-earnest air. The ropes that suspend them.
The brutal flare of their painted-in nostrils, the brutal
Whirl of their unfurling manes in the painted-on air.
Their paralyzed mouths the yellow bit snares,
Their petrified stares tapped by flies riding air
And they’re riding in silence, glassed in
By air and the two girls who poke them
Dead in the eye and pound their fists on
The pained-on flanks are beginning to cry.
For the brutal white horses don’t bolt or whinny, don’t
Ever die, but ride their dead circles, noses on high,
The dead air upon them, the painted-on saddles
And painted-on reins, and painted-on lives. What mind
Would have them, circling and glassy, immune
And frozen in constant alarm.
The title of this book reads like the opening of a ghost story, and indeed there are many hauntings here, usually in the guise of those childhood fears—the dark, mice, hanging dolls—and the troubling experiences in adolescence that leave an indelible mark on the psyche: “Every kiss was bruise.” But then these early encounters become tropes, the shattered lenses through which the adult processes her grown-up days of loss, love and life. In a poem about birthday wishes, the speaker concludes:
The wishes were not all sublime—some cantankerous—
dirty and grim, sad, and many sweeping by
lost from the original mouth and mind
that hoisted them into the air.
For years I stood watching them while behind me
my house burned and my land and the forest beyond.
In the poem “Carousel,” Lynch examines the morbid concept of the merry-go-round and the bestiary that adorns it, vulnerable and exploitable in a forced paralysis. These “brutal white horses”—perhaps it’s the color that’s brutal, suggesting innocence and purity in a condition that is anything but—are subjected to the cruelty of the children who ride them, “who poke them/ Dead in the eye.” And then these same little girls have the gall to cry, most likely because the ride—the pleasure of the abuse—is over.
Note also the music and cacophony of the poem, interwoven dactyls that come to a grating halt with the introduction of a line whose rhythm (or counter-rhythm) completely undermines the dominant foot. As with the carousel, the dark undercurrent takes over.
Also worth mentioning is Part III of the book, a touching elegiac series of poems in remembrance of Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, her story of survival after cancer claimed nearly half of her lower jaw. Grealy’s friendship with Ann Patchett is compellingly depicted in Patchett’s memoir, Truth & Beauty. Lynch offers an intimate portrait of a woman who relates to the world so differently because of how differently the world saw her:
Someone is always whispering
about me Lucy says deeply in my ear.
They must be angels, or harmonicas.
An inventiveness inhabits the poems in this book because there is no better way to mend the troubled psyche than through the creativity of language. In the modern world where even the birds are dangerous (“the blackbirds with their bright razors/ tucked in each wing”) how else to come near them? How else to come to terms with the strange beauty the speaker identifies with?
(From It was a terrible cloud at twilight, published by Pleiades Press, 2008. Used with the permission of the author.)
P.S. You can catch the lovely Alessandra Lynch and fellow Wednesday Shout Out-ee hunk Gregory Pardlo at The Quetzal Quill reading series I host at Cornelia Street Café, Saturday, March 29 at 6 pm. They’ll be reading with fierce short story writer Annecy Báez, author of My Daughter’s Eyes. Come by and say hello!

Co-founded in 2006 by poet and book reviewer Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), Achiote Press publishes two chapbooks each season: a single-author chapbook and a chap-journal featuring poetry, prose, essay, or translation by authors from diverse cultural and aesthetic backgrounds. Co-founders Jennifer Reimer, Len Shneyder, and art director Jason Buchholz help select, edit and produce works that address “what it means to bear witness, to use adaptations as resistance, to cross borders, to map ourselves onto a dislocated world, to speak in exile, and to suffer diasporic hunger.”
Past projects include works by three of my favorite writers: Javier Huerta, Barbara Jane Reyes and Francisco X. Alarcón. Projects to look forward to: an all-Latina writer issue with Cristina García, Emmy Pérez, Brenda Cárdenas, Gabriela Erandi Rico, and Maria Tuttle; and an issue featuring several Native Pacific Island writers.
Why the Achiote as a logo symbol? Santos Perez explains: “Achiote is a shrub or small tree indigenous to Central and South America. Introduced to the Pacific and Asia by the Spanish in the 17th century, Achiote now has firm transnational roots. Achiote produces pink flowers and red spiny seed pods. Peoples have used the seeds as a dye for clothing, arts and crafts, as body paint in times of war and celebration, as spice and coloring for food. Other parts of the Achiote tree have been used to make various medicinal remedies for sunstroke, burns, fever, sore throat, blood disease, eye and ear infections, and hypertension. Achiote has also been used as an aphrodisiac. We named our press after the Achiote tree because we believe poetry has the very same powers to enrich our surroundings, inspire our passions, enhance our senses, and heal our wounds.”
If anything, this press seems to be the antidote I have been waiting for against my usual gripe when I pick up a literary journal—any literary journal—Where are the writers of color? This small press hailing from El Cerrito, Califaztlán is on a mission and so far it’s been one exciting production after another.
(You can read more about the goings-on and getting-downs of Achiote Press at Craig Santos Perez’s blog.)
Palabra Magazine is a no apologies, no nonsense literary journal founded by Chicana dramatist and poet elena minor in Los Angeles. This magazine is a forum that showcases Chicano/ Latino writing that’s all about (warning: Chicano-speak ahead): “exploration, risk and ganas—the myriad intersections of thought, language, story and art—el más allá of letters, symbols and spaces into meaning. It’s about writing that cares as much about language and its structure as about content and storytelling—and that shows awareness of and attention to the possibilities of both. Mostly it’s about work with the emotional fiber that threads all honest art… Its intent is to present an eclectic and adventurous array of thought and construct, alma y corazón, and a few carcajadas woven in for good measure.”
Going strong since its debut issue back in 2006 (hmm, it must have been a good year for las artes revolucionarias) Palabra Magazine fills a huge gap in the Chicano/ Latino literary landscape since the folding of that historic all-raza journal, The Américas Review (formerly Revista Chicano-Riqueña)—the final issue was edited by my beloved cousin Lauro Flores (it runs in the family, y’all). Editor extraordinaire elena minor se deja cae’ la greña with fierce issue after fierce issue. Stay up, esa.
And from minor’s own words of wisdom: “I identified a need for a literary journal that embraced both Latino new language and bilingual sensibilities and that didn’t assume that awkward English syntax, when written by a Latino writer was, per se, just bad grammar. Palabra is intended to make no such assumptions—even if the work is written entirely in English. There are more than 900 print and online independent literary journals and presses in the U. S. Approximately a dozen are editorially Latino-focused but none doing what I envisioned for Palabra, so I added it to the mix. Because one size does not fit all and cada loco con su tema.”
This new journal also spares me another one of my frequent gripes: when liberal-minded literary journals try to be down with the brown and put out “all-Latino issues,” an effort akin to a migra raid, if I’ve ever seen one. The well-meaning editors round up la raza for one-time only party. Just watch out for the Kool-Aid, vato. Thanks, but no thanks. We’ve got Palabra Magazine, ese. And Achiote Press, and I hope this will encourage more activism from other editors-to-be. Writers of all colors need to stop waiting in line for the hand-outs and do it themselves. Peace out.

The first time I visited the Center was shortly after the release of my first book of poetry in 1999. An early mentor, Gary Soto, had generously invited me to be his co-reader at a “New Millennium” reading series there. He brought in the audience of about 300 and I benefited from the exposure. Thanks, vato.
Anyway, back then the Center was a quaint little cottage with a squeaky floor and a facility for housing a visiting poet. Soto stayed in the guest room and commented later that the carpet looked like “The entrance to hell.” But one thing could not be denied: the heartbeat of the place was its living archive, the Center’s mission to safeguard anything and everything that was poetry. No published verse would ever be lost, obscured or forgotten again. I rattled off a few titles by Chicano authors I was sure would not be included in the collection, and I was humbled each time:
“Eagle-Visioned/ Feathered Adobes by Ricardo Sánchez?”
“It’s here.”
“Evangelina Vigil-Piñón’s The Computer is Down.”
“Got it.”
But the highlight of my visit was a car ride I took with the then-director of the Center, the poet Alison Hawthorne Deming, to the reading site (events back then were held on the University of Arizona campus). We talked about our projects, books that excited us, people and places we had in common. We talked about what had taken us to poetry, why we loved this world we inhabited and how we envisioned our futures as advocates of all things literary. It was such a heartwarming exchange I remember hugging Alison and feeling that I had made the right choice if I was going to cross paths with souls like hers.
Fast-forward to 2008: the Poetry Center turns forty-eight years old this year (it was inaugurated back in 1960 by none other than Robert Frost), it continues to hold seminars, writing classes, workshops, lectures, and of course poetry readings (the first readers back in 1962 were Stanley Kunitz and Kenneth Rexroth), but now these events are usually held at the new $6.8 million state-of-the-art 17,000 square foot Helen S. Schaefer Building. The Center continues to reach out to its community through various educational programs and poetry contests for young people (including a bilingual corrido contest—¡ajúa!), and Alison, well, she continues her tireless efforts as an active member of the development committee. The current executive director is Gail Browne.
I look forward to visiting the Center on my next trip to the Southwest. It’s a glorious space and now an essential artery for the arts, all thanks to the generosity of such philanthropists as its founder, Ruth Walgreen Stephan, and Helen S. Schaefer herself. And I will be remiss if I don’t return to celebrate also Alison Hawthorne Deming, whose positive energy continues to be the draw to Tucson for many of us poets living outside of Arizona.
Any other arts, and specifically poetry-championing, organizations outside of the obvious New York City ones we should all know about? Give a shout back.

Brief History of My Mother
My mother, fourteen, makes a girl
eat an entire can of Alpo.
At forty, she leaves her husband
for a man who wears women’s underwear.
Every Friday night of my childhood, she’s criminal.
The door creaks open for the same cop, his broad smile.
Bank of America calls for Marsha Hall.
I’m not in right now, she says.
My mother, thirteen, smokes mentholated cigarettes.
The burn dissolves to a tight hiss on her thigh.
She wakes to her father’s kiss and cannot breathe.
My mother promises, The abuse will stop with me.
She tries to die, once, by swallowing pills, choking
them up as I hold back her hair.
In green pants, orange sash: Miss Safety-Guard,
1982. She blacks out her front teeth, smiles at men
who cat-call to her on the corner, her stop sign in hand.
Their faces quicken from the slap of her unbeauty.
Tries to die, once, by standing in traffic
on a dirt road at 3 a.m. My mother, desperate for a Mack truck.
My mother asks the doctors to turn off her dying
father’s respirator. She watches him struggle to breathe.
My mother’s tombstone will read,
Gone to see my mother.
Note a few of the titles in this stunningly candid collection: “Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas”; “Portrait of My Mother as Rosemary Woodhouse” (as in, Rosemary’s Baby; and “Portrait of My Mother as Self-Inflicting Philomena.” The many possible roles of this awesome figure speak to the spectrum of emotions that she’s capable of eliciting from the speaker. And he shifts his function in response to each: biographer, historian, supporting cast member, voyeur, therapist, guide, savior and other guises for the word “son.”
The terrible bond is blessing and affliction—the incarnation of gravitas. In the poem “Song” about the speaker’s birth, and Mother’s violence toward the nurse that would separate her from her child, the speaker observes: “My mother’s hand,/ the nurse’s mouth: I was born between them, calling/ from the open wound, wanting to heal her/ even before I could be heard.”
The non-linear timeline in the poem above suggests a rate of revelation—the mother’s formative moments disclosed, piecemeal and out of sequence, to the speaker, who collects them as life lessons of his own. And there is that hair-prickling moment in the end of the poem, in which the speaker envisions the mother’s death, but not without her sometimes flippant attitude toward trauma and the business of seriousness. The son is an apt pupil indeed.
But make no mistake, there is also much tenderness and respect for the Mother in this book, except that her three-dimensionality is consuming. In the poem “In Praise of Lies,” the speaker notes: “Wherever my mother is tonight,/ praise her. She invented the woman who taught me passion,/ not beauty, is the mother of truth.” And yet, in the poem “The End of Myth,” the following affirmation: “The myths do not instruct us in forgiveness. They only say/ whose wrath is wedded to whose form.”
This is an impressive and exceptional debut of a book that doesn’t shy away from the unkind politics of the dysfunctional family. There are no accusations here, nor regrets or histrionics; only the creation of bittersweet portraits that celebrates the love and strength that rises from the rubble.
(From Now You’re the Enemy, published by the University of Arkansas Press, 2008.)

And more: Ugly Duckling Presse also supports works off the page in collaboration with visual and performance artists: “UDP endeavors to create spaces in which people can have an experience of art free of expectation, coercion and utility.” To reiterate: refreshing, isn’t it?
Marvei Yankelevich, original co-founder, is still very much involved with the press. He has journeyed along with the various homes and growing stages of UDP—from Europe to America, from Boston to the various boroughs of New York City. Currently, it nests on the Old American Can Factory in Gowanis, Brooklyn. Among Yankelevich’s many roles is editing the Eastern European Poets Series. One of the many finds in this series is the book Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers, published in 2006, this is the all-attitude, in-your-face poetics of Mecedonian poet Lidija Dimkovska, translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid.
The opening poem “Decent Girl” is full of zingers from its opening “I took my perspective of the future to a thrift store/ but nobody would buy it,” to its finger-snapping ending, “We’re having tea, biting each other’s nails/ and licking our lips. Chirp chirp! Metachirp metachirp!” And in-between is an exhausting girl’s guide to survival in a male-centered culture and economy: “I’m not afraid of Virginia Wolf,/ I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her?”
In a later poem the speaker asks: “How long can the bat in me keep/ from appearing in front of the guests?” The truth is she’s unstoppable and will not be ignored.
Budapest
Had you not set out to conquer the void
between the balcony and Budapest
I wouldn’t have left you without one ear,
I wouldn’t have held you in a total derangement of nerves.
Rimbaud could not foresee everything.
Let him come and judge for himself
if life is more expensive that a TV set—
particularly as the Romanians have PRO-TV
and Macedonians have 200,000 refugees—
and if life can be fenced in by a TV screen without turning love
into a public performance of trained cats.
I owe you a small spoon of Immunal for every word
and for your nails—a book of poems which,
according to decree No. 07-3944/2
issued by the Ministry of Culture, a reduced tax shall be paid.
Fantasy is a dogma, you accept it or you don’t.
Atrophy of conscience, and out bed is shared.
The dental floss becomes apocalyptic
when you decided to get to Budapest or bust,
but it’s closed for inventory.
The three girls who once picked pumpkins
whisper in your ear: I want you!
The folk hero of the Eastern World
has outdone Kierkegaard in the tactics of Seducer, B.A.
The West eavesdrops in the church vestibule—
“To him that belong the sheep belongs the mountain”—
and trips God on the way to Budapest.
Self-service is confirmed individuality. You can even eat raw meat
and nobody will reprimand you. Atrophy of conscience, my love,
babies understanding Sanskrit and screaming in ancient Greek,
Homer, Je te manque! How much longer will the walls
be walls, that’s something only dermatologists know
but they keep silent. What? You didn’t know I was a mason?
Only Hölderlin’s tower will save us
from the sous chefs of literature.
Yes, but had you not set out to conquer the void
between the balcony and Budapest,
I would not have left you without one ear, with empty pockets,
I could, as you yourself have said,
have unburdened my conscience into them.
Fantasy is a dogma, you accept it or you don’t.
and the fact that I’m a woman changes nothing
except, it seems, the infrastructure of Budapest.
Dimkovska’s sense of social consciousness is biting, playful and never backs down from the many political, historical or linguistic conflicts she brings up. Even the translators are put on notice:
Authorized translator, that’s you, not me. Check it over,
read me again, correct the errors,
give form to the text, give form to me with the tip
of the tongue (lingue/parole).
When the mucous membrane starts trembling
seal me, fold me in two, disown me/you,
the angel, the question of life and death,
enter me in a crossword and that’s it.
Perhaps this is why the poet/speaker is told in another poem: “you won’t end up in an oven, but you won’t end up/ in the catalogue of National Library either.” If Dimkovska is an indication of the works in the series, then sign me up. I need to get the other fabulous titles. And I’d also like to acknowledge and congratulate Ugly Duckling Presse for their sobering mission and for the many fantastic projects they undertake.

The following is part 22 from a touching 27-part autobiographical sequence, “Taken With,” that narrates the collapse (and eventual death) of the poet’s mother, Eleanor, of a stroke.
I was back to help clean out her room when
an old man misaligned in his wheelchair shouted
Young man come here from a corner of the lounge.
No staff visible and again Young man come here.
I went and stood in front of him like we were in the military.
Young man I have a question. I said yes?
Was that man I saw a while ago over there my mother?
I’ve rarely felt as certain as I did then and I said no.
He said again I want to know if that man I saw a little while ago
was my mother. No panic in his voice just level curiosity.
I said no again like I was a visiting academic. Are you certain?
I’m certain I said and he said Okay. I just wanted to know.
Thank you young man. I went back to her last room.
And what if I had said I’m your mother and I still love you?
One of the tropes in this collection is the jigsaw puzzle—the speaker sees one in the obituary page, in the segregating street grid of downtown Seattle, in the cells that bleed into one another to create motion in a film, in the experience of disorientation at a hospital recovery lounge or a waiting room: always an effort to pull the self together by collecting the surrounding pieces to make one’s environment whole.
So too the long poem “Taken With,” itself a reconstruction of events, a timeline gathered piece by piece because its entirety is devastating. And even if the pieces don’t fit together perfectly, the result is a necessary therapy. Comfort comes from memory and communication, not accuracy.
In the poem above, a similar dynamic occurs: the speaker, succumbing to his grief, must fit whatever comes his way, no matter what shape, no matter how odd, into his own “misaligned” narrative, he who must move forward in the world with “pieces” of himself now missing:
Eleanor Wallace
all loss is small loss
Eleanor Wallace
The long poem, the third section in the book, engages the matter of emotional recovery, and section one centers on the poet’s physical recovery after getting hit by a car. They embrace the middle section “Where Else,” a celebration of everyone’s beloved and complicated Northwest city: “Seattle is a rubble kit too.” Perhaps the poem that truly captures the complexity of this sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful place is the haiku-like poem “April”:
Reading while walking
a fist of cherry blossoms
punished her.
Marshall is a poet with sensibilities well-tuned to the emotional landscape of loss and the difficult process of healing. He’s a collector of the smaller details that become representative of a greater experience.
(From Meaning A Cloud, published by Oberlin College Press, 2008.)

Site-Specific Adaptations
November, 2004
This winter, I became a man.
It happened the first week of November
while my girlfriend guided
photo tours of polar bears.
For a week in Manitoba, she wakes,
eats, and rides the tundra buggies
with tourists over eskers, lending
story to what they see. This year, though,
another landscape competes
with what’s running the boreal
treeline: she and I
are on the ballot. Our home.
Our tax burden and hospital
visitation rights in eleven
states. She’s wary. Bans talk
of the election. But still,
to some of them she looks
suspect: short-haired, short-nailed,
with a walk that’s wide and expects
to be made way for. Out in the tundra,
she tries to keep them focused—
Look at the fox digging
for his cache of meat. But,
no bears in sight, a bored wife turns
from the view saying, ‘So
have you left anyone at home?’
My lover says, A gyrfalcon!
Until the last few years, we knew
almost nothing of their nesting habits.
It’s November 2. Four more days
with this group, seven with the next,
then she’ll come home to me.
What weather they’re having—
mid-twenties and clear, bears
at the bay’s edge in golden light
testing the new ice, hungry for seal.
Four more days in the buggy. Four more
dinners of careful talk. My husband
is a poet, she finally says. For the first time
not risking this truth and hating
that what she loves
could bring her to this lie.
Bradfield is a naturalist, and a number of the poems in this book walk the two sides of the environmental avenue: wonder at the beautiful discoveries in the natural world, and concern, even outrage, at the threats imposed against it—extinction, pollution, industrialization. Human carelessness—blindness—continues to endanger the already frail flora and fauna at every corner of the earth. But the speaker moves beyond accusation and into the position of accountability: “Allow me to be responsible for you.” And furthermore, on the subject of our feathered neighbors, from the poem “Splitters & Joiners”: They are
joined to us. Separate from. These birds
with their own stories and associations, flying through
the groupings we imagine and impose. Not unaffected,
though, by the long, strange echoes of their names.
Cleverly, Bradfield applies this “co-habitation” of populations with two other groups: the straight and the queer one—“joined to us. Separate from.” The use of such words as “natural,” “vulnerability,” and the outcry at the imposition of a dominant group over the well-being of another suddenly take on a more complicated resonance.
The context of the poem above is the Bush reelection year, when our soon-to-be-out-of-office-but-not-soon-enough Republican president ran on the anti-gay marriage campaign. The “site-specific adaptations” is in reference to the art of survival of both animals and members of the GLBTQ community. Confronted with adversity and ever-changing political/ global climates, creatures of this world, of the troubled times persevere and overcome.
The power center for the speaker is voice and language, which is why that fight-back phrase, “My husband/ is a poet” comes laden with affirmations of pro-same sex marriage and agency of expression. Bradfield demonstrates this shift in power dynamics—taking the upper hand in the struggle against homophobic rhetoric and hate speech—with the poem “Cul-de-sac Linguistics” in which a group of young boys being to taunt a lesbian couple with an “anti-homo riff”:
O, the high profanity of kickball games,
the rough posturing demanded
by even this tame street. Listen, they’re learning
how well bastard fits with fucking, how ass
can’t be mis-used. No one could hope to ease
their jagged entries into this profane world
which is fucking beautiful, ass-bastard gorgeous,
the evening light wild and soaring
like kickballs on a true arc into flowerbeds
of penis tulips and pussy daffodils
that nod their heads in wild agreement
with the whorish, shit-loving lot of it.
This book has set a high standard for the series, but Arktoi Books will no doubt deliver. A forthcoming poetry title The Heart’s Traffic is by Kundiman fellow Ching-In Chen. And I look forward to other titles in this welcomed new series that promises to extend the conversation of identity politics and queer activism to an exciting new level.

(From Interpretive Work, published by Arktoi Books, 2008. Used with the permission of the series editor.)

Making Love to Leopard Man
Though I’m not a needle, let me touch you.
Let me look into the pink secret of your ear.
Let me part, one by one, your reclusive, unmarked toes.
Trust me, you are not the first man I’ve known
who thought he was an animal, who’s sharpened
his claws without knowing what to do with them.
Like continents, your bruise-green spots drift apart.
Lying beside you, I watch the ink bleed slowly
into the tiny channels of skin, edges blurring
into your yellow sea. One-hundred-six islands
I’ve counted so far: that one looks like a storm cloud,
that one at your hip like the head of a woman.
You’re not the only one who knows how to make
the body an elaborate disguise. How I wish
the children who torment you would throw stones
at the ugly hut of my life and scatter like birds
when I glare at them. I want to bathe my scars
in the isle’s dirty river. I want fangs.
Let me show you how hermit crabs do it: tap
my borrowed shell until I uncurl like a raw finger,
exposing myself to salt. Out there, I could be eaten,
I could be carried by the current into the mouth
of prey. Hold me closer with your human claws.
For now, let’s pretend we have nothing to hide.
The title of this collection is not a metaphor, it’s a literal heart outside the body, a fatal condition known as ectopia cordis. But little Christopher Wall holds the record for being the longest known survivor born with an external vital organ. He is the speaker of the poem: “I’ve lived/ so long the doctors say I’ll die// like everyone else.” And so the nature of this collection—portraits of human oddities and curiosities fit for the sideshow of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. But don’t call them “freaks.” They prefer the term “prodigies.”
In the poem above, the inspiration is the appropriately surnamed Tom Leppard, the Brit who tattooed 99.9% of his body with the prints of a—well, does it need to be said? Lenox found Leppard, and many of the other citizens of this “misfit menagerie” within the pages of the Guinness World Records, but she takes each stunning discovery and celebrates, interestingly enough, the ordinariness of it because to gawk and stare and ridicule difference is the easy response. Complexity is in finding common ground, in connecting the humanity between watcher and wonder. “Making Love to Leopard Man” operates from the conceit that it’s not the inked skin what makes him special, but the man beneath. For more on this truth, see “Bernie Bares All,” about the world’s oldest male stripper.
Lenox’s poems are playful and inventive, yet her subjects preserve their dignity. She does not exploit or explain; she simply applies a redemptive lens to these “strange people” who, at the end of the day, don’t seem so foreign after all. In fact, they come across as all-too similar. The couplet in the opening poem summarizes the nurturing relationship between the poet and her poems:
Stay close to me, my lovelies, my silly metaphors.
I will put you in one basket, all my spoiled eggs.
Congrats to Stephanie Lenox, to Slapering Hol Press. And kudos to the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center for championing writers and writing for the last twenty years!