Kay Ulanday Barrett
The idea for this poem started during the winter holiday season, a time when photos of family members and jovial winter holidays bombard social media. I do not have any blood family still alive. Honest reframe: I no longer have blood relatives alive or who wish to talk to me given my life as a Transgender person. The fall and winter holidays become an intrinsically lonely time and this kind of loneliness is a perfect pattern for writing. I have 2-3 photo albums I turn to when I’m charged with sadness. I realized ache wasn’t solely about death, but about being in diaspora, how loss takes over your lineage and how a simple mundane act of looking at photo albums can make you swell with emotion.
During the first major revision, I formatted the poem in tercets without virgules, then a hybrid of tercets and couplets with em-dashes. Still pacing wasn’t what I wanted. I worked on this poem for about a month or so as I noticed it lacked the momentum and the sonic playfulness I hoped for. I frequently read poems aloud and perform them in earlier draft sessions to get a sense of scansion; musicality often guides the line for me. The cadence of the poem succumbs to pauses and complexity of frenetic existence. The pauses create an inextricable circuitry of death and mourning are in banter and daily occurrence. When someone dies, it doesn’t just happen once—it becomes a constant rediscovery in the most inopportune moments. Photo albums are vessels, much like a time capsule. I wanted the poem to echo this curation, an almost musical embodiment of flashes and instants of small miseries. This non-linear loss felt more cohesive in prose block. The rhythm with enjambments really built the landing with a final directive: “go – paddle to find her.” I wanted this poem to address what it feels like when you are the only one alive to talk about a place, family, city, home. I wanted the halt in mid-page to feel abrupt and channel longing.
*
This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day for Academy of American Poets in 2019 and the poetry collection More Than Organs published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
< draft 1 >
While looking at photo albums
Christmas Eve, 2016
< final draft >
While looking at photo albums
Christmas Eve, 2016
Brittany Rogers
Instead of a kiss cam or dance cam, at Detroit basketball games, the Ice Cam prompts folks to show off their jewelry. The Ice Cam embodies Detroit: Black, audacious, unashamed. Online commenters watch the clips and call us uncouth while they inquire about our priorities, children, and budgets.
Like any Detroiter, their critique only makes me love my city more deeply and loudly — prompting a series of odes for the Ice Cam. This poem was inspired by a comment that implied we should be too afraid of being robbed to show off in public.
All of my first drafts begin on paper, which allows me to cross out what isn’t working while having access to my flow of thoughts and ideas, and move to docs once they are more sure of themselves. My earliest draft pointed at the trope of Detroit as this ever dangerous place, and makes the claim that we deserve joy in spite of. In doing so, I was reinforcing presumptions that had no place in my work. By draft four, I realized I was actually invested in class and the presumption of access. Who dictates what is gaudy? Whose gaze are we bowing to, and why? Who gets to be audacious enough to brag?
I cut the latter half of the poem to shift the focus. The poem was never intended to center the anonymous online critic. That clarity allowed me to move toward the final edits. I put the tweet which triggered this particular poem as the epigraph, which allowed me to focus more on interiority. I realized I wanted the language of the poem to mirror the actions and spirit of the Detroiters in the stadium. When I got out of the mode of defense, the speaker was able to flex.
< draft 1 >
< draft 2 >
< draft 6 >
Ice Cam, Little Caesars Arena
When the ice cam cuts it’s eye
Towards our section, we do what we must:
Curl a thumb under the cuban
Link and lift it high as praise.
It’s true: no one is untouchable.
Not even you. Do we rob
Ourselves, then? Toss off
Our adornments, bare
Bushes, dry under winters
Snapping breeze? Why
Should we wither? Because
You’re looking, plotting
Thirsty for my throat and
What you take for wealth?
Look
What a little faith can provide.
Not a target. A banner. Beacon.
No one is untouchable. Not even you.
< final draft >
Ice Cam, Little Caesars Arena, January 2022
“That Pistons ice cam is some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, do they not rob niggas in Detroit?! I would cover my face and run if there was ever an ice cam in [ ]” -Twitter user
When the ice cam cuts its eye
towards our section, we do what we must:
curl a thumb under the cuban
link and lift it high as praise.
No one is untouchable.
Not even you, pleading tone it down
at the jewels seen cackling throughout
the stadium. Strip bare
our pinkies, wrists, chests —
for whose gaze? Those thirsty
for our throats and what they take
to be wealth? Your problem is really our nerve,
thick as tobacco smoke.
You wish we’d get rid of it.
We know. We know.
The gold is just a cover.
Maggie Queeney
I started writing this poem, to the best of my memory, in 2012. I don’t know how to describe the inciting incident, except to say there was a half hour I thought I had sent my younger sister to find the body of my older sister, who had threatened suicide and then turned off her cellphone. My older sister did not die then. She died in December 2021. My father found her body. The medical examiner determined the cause of death was organ failure. She was 43 years old. Facts are necessary, important. They do not convey the ongoing terror and horror and exhaustion of the years leading up to this poem, and the years after.
I remember first drafting this poem between tasks at a part time office job downtown. I often write difficult poems while otherwise occupied, focused elsewhere, the way I would approach a strange animal. In the earlier draft, the short lines kept me from having to stay in any place for too long. I move quickly from image to image: stars plotting a constellation, the hard plastic beads of a rosary. The longer lines in the final draft forces me to slow and articulate.
I often turn to form when approaching subject matter that scares me. Forms are a type of armor or spell: they allow me to hold what I often cannot hold on my own, and provide a structure for an encounter. This poem is about two sisters, what binds them together and propels them apart. The push-pull of the couplets, the couplings and divisions that structure creates, drives the poem forward, past the places I want to go, until the last line breaks off into white space and silence. There is no resolution here.
< early draft >
in kind
The scaffolding ropes rap
the window glass, my blurred portrait cast
and staring back into the room thirty-three floors
above the street. Beyond, the lake waits, a distant,
disoriented curtain drawing back to reveal
the basement where my sister's body hangs
like a naked tongue from the exposed pipe,
throat striated, a daybreak in negative; the flight
of stairs floored in scribbled limbs; her scarlet bath.
Resurrected, she laughs, lifts a shaft
of wheat-gold hair over a peak of shoulder.
The dose I swallow swells her stomach.
The gas burner drawing a blue coronet
under my boiling, fragrant pots flames
into a forked tongue licking her skin
charred-sweet and smoky. Her ghosts pace
the mean length of my hallway; clattering
chains punctuate the hours without pattern or passion.
The cradled head drawing blood over her hip
stares but does not look, worn into static
symbol by her staggered gait, measured as land breaks
water into waves, the jerking body of a dog in heat.
Speech turns to elegy, eulogy, last wills
and testaments as dresses black and wither
into weeds on my back, tender
and pitless as stone. Eyes divided
between the hands at my sides,
each so close in kind
to the hand that draws knives
into her hips, wrists. Untrusting,
unknowable as strays, they bathe, clothe,
arrange and paint the life-like face,
then bury and burn—each,
none, no one enough.
< FINAL draft >
in kind
Jenny Johnson
What feels important and vulnerable to share is how much time I spent thinking about and subsequently revising the nine or so lines of flower and bumblebee imagery in this poem. What I was attempting to describe was a scene which I had observed in my backyard.. (click line to left for link.) The flowers, which I had planted the previous summer, I knew to be blue bottle gentians, local to my bioregion, attractive to pollinators, such as bumble bees and carpenter bees.
I shared an early draft with my friend Jess, who said, “Jenny, I like it, but the flower part – you could do way better.” Jess knew from our book group conversations that behind-the-scenes I had been thinking a lot about the liberatory joy that can come from consensual power exchange. And so, she asked me: “Like, why is the bumble bee the top?”
We laughed about this. And yet, she was onto something. When writing about power dynamics between people, I take great care, but here in this early draft I had composed a moment of sub-par flower/bumblebee porn. I could do better. I say porn because the sentence is set-up so that a “we” is watching an erotic scene between two players – bumblebee and flower, and I say porn because this is a poem that is very much about feeling revved up or turned-on by the micro-gestures between sentient beings, things, intimate containers, i.e. bodies.
I purposefully hadn’t assigned a gender to either the bee or the flower. I hadn’t re-inscribed the patriarchal tropes, where flowers (as analogues for women’s bodies) are objectified and exoticized. But I had failed to give clear agency to the flowers. Though this may seem obvious, writing our way out of harmful projections and tired scripts for gender and sex is challenging because such scripts are deeply embedded in so much of what we read and consume. In my first draft, the bees were doing things, but the flowers were hazily described as “upside-down umbrellas.”
Over the next few weeks, I attempted at least ten different versions of these lines. The revision attempts were not going very well. Yet, I’ve found that my best descriptive work often springs from patient, curious inquiry. And so, I stayed with the image. There was a queer feeling that I knew that I was trying to get across when I described the bees as disappearing inside dressing rooms, costuming themselves in pollen. There was a charged dynamic between flower and bee that I hadn’t yet found language for.
Tropes get in the way of transformative play, but so does shame. Sometimes when I’ve struggled to make eroticism clear in my work it’s because some part of me has feared being explicit. Shame, I’ve learned, eclipses the erotic imagination, turning our gaze inward, disconnecting us from one another. Which is why fully channeling and dignifying our erotic visions through language is radical and important relational work.
Ultimately, I wanted to describe a high voltage encounter between a flower and a bumblebee that didn’t convey a power-over or a power-under dynamic, but power-with. In other words, I wanted to give the flowers agency as strong tops and the bumblebees agency, too, as busy dizzy bottoms.
In my final revision, the flowers are named. In this power exchange, the blue bottle gentians are in control; they are “flexing…open and shut.” The bees are active, too, “submerging” themselves in “dizzy subspaces” (a space of euphoria in s/m sometimes experienced by a submissive player). Am I anthropomorphizing? Absolutely. But I’m also attempting in my imagery to offer alternative frames for seeing and experiencing the extraordinary life forces that surround us.
< DRAFT >
All day we could have watched
bumblebees disappearing head-first
into upside down umbrellas,
partially open paper dressing rooms, trying on things
till they’d wrapped themselves in a good dusting of pollen.
< BAD REVISION >
All day we could have watched
bumblebees disappearing head-first
into petals shaped like bottles,
< another BAD REVISION >
All day we could have watched
bumblebees disappearing head-first
inside the bluest shapes of restless flames,
< final REVISION >
All day we could have
watched clusters of blue bottle gentians
flexing their umbrellas open and shut
as bumblebees submerged head-first
into one bloom after another,
dizzy subspaces, partially open
paper dressing rooms, trying on things
till they'd wrapped themselves
in a good dusting of pollen.
< final poem >
PEDAL
I have a friend who measures desire
by stillness, who is most turned on
by the person in the room who meditates
without flinching. The librarian, too,
in the Manuscripts Division, handling
the patron who can’t seem to stay seated
warns: I will serve you the smallest items first
as a knit sweater slides off a chair’s back
into a loose knot. All day we could have
watched clusters of blue bottle gentians
flexing their umbrellas open and shut
as bumblebees submerged head-first
into one bloom after another,
dizzy subspaces, partially open
paper dressing rooms, trying on things
till they'd wrapped themselves
in a good dusting of pollen. Everywhere
intimate containers seem to be in motion.
The raised bed full of squash flowers.
The black latex glove masking
the bare hand ladling bowls
of wedding soup for the lunch crowd.
My quick pedal revved by the world.
First published in Poem-a-Day on Poets.org, December 2020
Ajanae Dawkins
I wrote this poem when I was first interested in exploring faith through writing. My earlier drafts were a failure of theology and process. My language became boring and predictable when I named God because I was afraid of invoking trauma and God without a testimony of healing. I was afraid of invoking questions about the trauma girls experience when they come into their bodies alongside God without offering answers. When my mentor asked me about the line “grew after I said stop, in the wrong / places, and stirred my blood,” I realized I was afraid to name sexual desire. I was afraid of its location. My poem collapsed where it should turn because I was afraid of what I would find when it did.
Consequently, my significant revision begins in the second stanza. The entrance of God as the pulse between my legs, the unknown internal danger, and the thing I reject for its unfamiliarity became the volta. In revision, I considered sound, enjambment, and structure but the most substantial barrier to the poem were the rules I made about what could coexist in it.
In bell hooks’ remembered rapture: the writer at work, she writes, “even though I prayed for divine guidance about my work, I was not really wholeheartedly willing to follow a path that was not in tune with my desires.” There is often a moment in writing/revising where if I can quiet my self-critical internal voice, another familiar voice arrives. This voice always knows more than I could pray to. Afterwards, when I read back to myself what I wrote, I can’t name where it came from. Revision led by my need for control, my anxious desires, and fear of what the page will uncover if I surrender those things is dishonest curation.
< draft >
nothing saves us from coming of age
I was harassed- first by my family’s
Eyes, noticing what I wasn’t
aware of. A rounding here. Softening.
Hardening. Growing whistle sharp.
They announced a change whenever
I entered a room. Breast. Hip. Thigh.
Getting grown. Getting. Womanly.
Womanish. Fast. Fast. Tail. Tailing
women. Then the boys, hallway-chasers.
Capable of cruelty and bra
tricks while my body harassed itself.
Grew after I said stop, in the wrong
places, and stirred my blood.
God, I told you, and a cloud forged
in your throat. You plant your daughters
here and they grow among weeds. God,
I told you and you gave a field new soil.
Spit seeds of every kind of flower from
between your teeth. Tulip, Calla Lily,
Sunflower. This is who I intended
for you all to be.
God of the perfect plan. God
of the body that grows
to surprise us. God of the daughters
who must grow to love themselves.
God of the daughters with thin
skin. God of loneliness. God of love
in the middle of the body rebelling.
God who strikes down weeds
that threatens the field. And still God
of the weeds. God of the field
of flowers that look nothing
like each other, that look everything
like each other, and whisper each
other’s names into the wind.
< REVISION >
of age
I was harassed. First by my family’s
eyes, noticing what I wasn’t
aware of. A rounding here.
Softening. Hardening. Growing
whistle sharp. They announced
a change whenever I entered
a room. Breast. Hip. Thigh. Getting
grown. Getting womanly.
Womanish. Fast. Fast. Tail. Tailing
women. Then the boys, hallwaychasers.
Fervently learning
to unhook a bra between two fingers
turned ragged metal. Turned razor
snickering in my back. Then,
my body betrayed itself. My singing
blood. It’s shrill and wanting voice,
I hissed over. I said, stop
but could feel my pulse
between my legs.
Who is galloping through my blood?
Who is whispering, for all the ways
the flesh will fail, I made you
like this? Who is blooming
at the mouth?
Quiet star-light God. Pulsewarm
harvest God. O, God
of the body. Of daughters
who learn to shield themselves.
God of loneliness.
God of love in the middle
of rebellion. God who strikes
down weeds that threaten
the field. And still,
God of the weeds.
God who watches our queries
growing tall as delphinium or sky,
and speaks
our names into the wind.