I am not too happy with this one. Too telling, too much agenda. I want to up the stylism a bit, and see if I can do something like Pretty bird (where style=subject, form=content), just with machines and whirrs and doom, but that is gonna take time and this is NAPO. Gotta keep it moving.
"Monster the Child" confuses me a bit. Like I can't tell if the speaker had a miscarriage or an abortion or is simply on birth control. It is a very strong poem, though, perhaps my favorite so far.
I was also confused by the third stanza of "Puberty". Like I get the overall vibe of growing up and the loss of innocence, but I feel like it's specifically referencing something I don't get.
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand." Leonardo Da Vinci
@niteowl, <3 thank you! Oh man. How to answer that. With the risk of explaining my thought process below?
Spoiler! :
I shoot myself in the foot writing in first person because the nature of first person is that we are talking about a specific moment and a specific instance. A reader wants to know what that specific feeling and instance is, in order for you to get that first person intimacy I am promising by choosing to write in 1st person. Perhaps that is the disconnect you feel? If so lemme know!
My intentions and agenda fit better with a third person narration. A narration that should tell the reader hey, this is a character who feels this way and there's distance between you and this character. So you do not know WHY she feels this way and that is important.
I wanted a more distant approach because what I am writing about is a "general feeling" (guilt, shame, ostracization) of the monster she feels when she is childless, rather than writing about a specific incidence of a moment in time as it happens, which is why the ambivalence here in the circumstances for the narrator's childlessness. In the reader's eyes it could be any of the above.
A narrator who has had an abortion, the reasons for this feeling stem from that most controversial of choice between another's life and one's own autonomy and the ending is basically (I choose to not be a mother, therefore in my own eyes, in society's eyes, am I a monster, a child?)
If the narrator had a miscarriage, she is feeling these same feelings under different circumstances that are NOT her fault but her biology. But she feels it her own fault anyway. It is wanting to SO badly be a mother but she cannot. (I choose to want to be a mother, but my body is a monster. Do I think less of the "womanhood" of my body if I see myself as a child for not having the ability to create children? )
Versus a narrator who has CHOSEN to be childless not because of biology or abortion but her own choice? So, even in choosing to not be a mother, she still feels these feelings: guilt, shame, ostracization? Why?
Society cannot tell the difference between the woman who has had an abortion, has had a miscarriage, or chooses to be childless well beyomd her 40s as an example. Society only sees: childless. And the judgement encompasses to all of these circumstances. It is important that as a reader (readers who represent society) that you CANNOT TELL WHICH one of these circumstances apply to this woman. Only that she is childless and that she feels this way.
Maybe this will make more sense in third person?
On Puberty
Spoiler! :
I kind of want puberty to feel clunky and awkward and weird but the third stanza I wanted to speak of like that embarrassment and weirdness you feel when inside you are the girl who plays with sock puppets and outside you got called to the dean's office for not wearing a training bra. Awkward. It kind of jolts you quick that you have to stop being this sockpuppet girl and worry about more adult matters. Like periods, those suck. I should probably polish and clarify that up more xD thx for reading and pointing out problem spots. That is GOLD to me. It gives me a fresh look that I am not quite getting down everything in my head onto the page. That eternal struggle I can't thank you enough ^^
This was a rude summer where the flies nestled in your ear practicing poker and leaving their pickings, and you quoted by them a sonnett of the world you came from
a landscape of women barefoot on balconies and spinning umbrella dresses for the storms in your mind
Tell me, were you that dead inside? for the maggots are now gambling for that heart of yours, that one they carved out of your shame to build new summer homes
A practice sketch and tracing I took the structure and concept from Abdul Ali's Trouble Sleeping and gave it a go with a wedding#rant revamp.
I do or Adieu
April arrives, la Monja clinks her coffee with my mother and deifies the preparations for the wedding procession. They ask about the ascots, the weaving of lace and the lighting of candles, and how many columns? What about the corsage? The cornelli must combiner con los silk of the cumberbunds, and all embellishments, ganache, will you go champagne or prosecco? How about fragrant mimosas?
Afterwards, scheme over table-seatings, gossip hyenas and lies. Take your lessons and learn the steps, they teach what to say in the calligraphy, one must keep your head-down, one must hand-write individual thank you notes. Mi hija, how come tu no smile?
As I glance to one side of the street, the lesbian poets purse their tangerine lips for all of two syllables cascades in the wind. Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck it! I’m soft-spoken, and she’s a caterwaul. I believe in naked bodies under moon skies. I do not deserve to be her daughter. I am not an immigrant to this country, I was borne from its loins! I am no self-starter. I don’t fit in with church, unlike my mother.
Never made many friends. I am sensitive. I retreat in my woods. Live in moments between hiccups. Prefer freckles to make-up. I smell like a man. I parkour. Running marathons, I skim my knee on the concrete. I’m nothing like my mother. I wear hockey pads.
I want to spend my wedding reading Trouble Sleeping, The False Lark, The Lunatic.
I visit Cabbagetown in search of lemon folk. I’m self-conscious. My palms tremble in the heat. Long before I could reply to you, your sassiness and la monja’s voice in my ears: a snare and a drum roll, mouthing to me how this life is the punch line! Get it? If I were to tell you, I do. I do. I do. If I were to tell you I was never meant to be the bride. And the disbelief on mother's face.
A wrinkled brow. My blush. The realization sinks in.
The doctor prescribed to me ice-cubes for my heat allergy. Heat has a character, depending on where you go and it’s good to be diagnosed.
There’s a heat in the South that bogs everything down, humid and drawn and stretched out of breath, these minute hands of a sweat shop, dog drops and you pick up after it, slick in it, a soldier drags on a war ditch. The whap whap whap of the fan— She’s the sort of woozy heat that warbles, a widow wallowing after drowning her slaves.
Then there's the heat of Argentinian markets. Viejita with a hammer fist. Picante, vivacious. Heat that cries thunderous. Pickled peppers and peros caliente. Long itineraries that pinches your pockets, tickles your tongue and talks back to you. Suck you mosquitos, viva the tropics demon of all heat mistresses, an intellect wit of a heat who lines us bronze for war against ourselves. That heat of a blazing matador.
Nothing to the headless horse of a dry heaven who hails you to dust after millenial conflicts.
To the hell of Sahara, the husband who hurt you, the oceans who stilled when mother dies sickly.
Heat who hunts for homes and hails hungry, deferring dreams and impoverishing green.
That is the Holy who pounds into you, to make sure you know that you are made of
wet and warmwet and warm,
human you are born of what needs and nourishes through wombs and tombs, both wild and courageous.
Grandmother and her visitors talk of the world as though flipping catalogues over which century to go.
Once upon a time, the world was cobblestone and uncle Bart climbed avocado trees.
They built this street in 89 and tore down this bodega, and up came Winn-Dixie, decades layered on top of decades, now it's a Starbucks.
She would say remember when, and her friend would rattle distances and people pre-Audrey, with a different accent for all things Post-Audrey, and I became for them that bridge connecting the worlds between.
Atlanta, we take a long walk. We put our ears like stethoscopes against her chest. Red clay, cool blood of the land smears against our palms. It felt like flesh, these rolling hills breathed an ancient pulse. Grass arm hairs glistened and soaked in its sweat and labor.
From our vantage, the white infrastructure, carved into the land like spinal bones, crumbling, falling apart a pregnant beast, the lands tremble out her progeny— fields and fields of rotten peach eggs.
Future humans will dig out these bones and discover dragons, how we lived inside her bellies and feasted upon her fire; homes crafted from her scales, holes penetrated deep, wings chopped down, and children strung out alive and swallowed whole.
Those Colorado wild roses, a husk gathered in sneezes. How it cripples my nose phlegm to the throat and when I spit it out, spit it all out every sun crying in our summers every whinny of those pony laughs bountiful freckles lining strong arms and callused fingers crawl out of me too, the allergies of the log house we stayed, you pushed your tongue and me on a barge and sailed away and I can't swallow anymore, in your absence, your scent suffocates.
And what of the blood in the sink from arthritic hands laundered raw?
Grandmother, I see you in the shake of branches before a hurricane.
I dreamed you could feel it in your bones my own sins and regrets, I dreamed I killed you and wrangled your neck with my own breath of lungs.
Knocking against door, against skull for the giant of a woman you once were who crafted from the mud whole villages, from the chimney pot bore stews for kin, who else but from your skin brought forth the warmth of the sea we came from and the struggles endured in relentless pleas?
Where are you, my giantess, my chaser of lions, my ghost?
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