Kemi Alabi
My writing process is usually very improvisational. I love to play with mood or questions through sound and image until something emerges. This poem was a little different. It was the first poem I wrote after hearing my other work talk to each other. I started writing into their conversation, and that led me to a series of poems all titled Against Heaven. The title became a kaleidoscope. I could turn it and find more patterns, more colors — more themes, more arguments — that traveled through the work as a whole.
I wanted this poem to approach “against” less like opposed to, more like right beside. Heaven lives in our popular imagination in so many ways, and the golden shovel form let me have an intertextual conversation with Saba’s “Heaven All Around Me” and Nick Hakim’s “Heaven.” (I love the Golden Shovel as imagined by Terrance Hayes, which honors the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. I also love a remix.)
My first draft began once I landed on the lyrics “there’s heaven all around me” and “what if heaven’s right here?” as beginning and end-words for each line. I brainstormed moods, tones, movements, and images to prime my pump. Then I poured into the container I built. For first drafts, I like to think of poems as a function of time, not space, and write without picking up my pen for a while. This first draft is wild and playful. Several revisions clarified what emerged with special attention to surprise and delight— sounds, images, observations, and other unexpected gifts language revealed. I stopped revising once I could repeat the poem over and over again, and it felt like a somatic intervention. An exhale.
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This poem was originally published November 29, 2020 in The Atlantic.
< draft 1 >
< final version >
against heaven
a double golden shovel with Saba and Nick Hakim
Sarah Audsley
(Silly me). I want poems to be a magic trick, to be swept away by mystery, to forget the mechanism, the poet’s effort. But no poem arrives through a trap door or is pulled from a top hat. (Silly rabbit). Perhaps, that is why insight into a poet’s revision process is so intimate—for me, it is embarrassing. (Sigh). My poems are not effortless magic spells. In fact, “Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse” was hard won, and still makes me cringe. I cannot help feeling that it is “not done” and that there is still “something not quite right.” This one eluded me for years. The Word.doc file was centered on my desktop where I keep poems that are nagging me. The earliest draft from April 2018 is included here since it’s the most embarrassing (read: leaning in). Drafts show the poet (i.e. me) working out ideas. In July 2018: tercets, one page, all in first person. March 2019: shift to third person, prose block of fourteen lines (when in doubt, try the sonnet!). May 2021: prose block, vary the pronouns, test point of view. This version includes the sentence, “See how third person shifts the focus.” At the onset, this poem began as an exercise in remembering a photograph of a childhood memory. Later, I experimented with authorial intrusion, finding the right poetic form, testing point of view…this is all to say that the poem’s final lesson is revealing the art (and effort) of revision, how important it is, how much it is its own kind of magic. After all, slight of hand mastery takes practice and patience, right? (Right).
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“Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse” from Landlock X. Originally published in Defunct Magazine, no 9 (Winter 2022). Copyright © 2022, 2023 by Sarah Audsley. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Texas Review Press, texasreviewpress.org.
< draft 1 >
Still Life with Watermelon Seeds and Dead Mouse
They are captured in a photograph: the watermelon
seeds, not the dead mouse. It’s furry body isn’t in the frame.
But I know it’s still there. First, the seeds. The serrated edge
would flash silver shards of light on the white kitchen’s walls
as he carved up the rotund fruit. He liked to add salt
to his slice. Spitting out the black slippery seeds
onto the stone walkway, made from stones my father
placed with his own callused, practiced hands after digging
up the dirt he inherited, this was a sign, the feeling of
lengthening summer days, lingering on the porch stoop.
I still imagine green vines routing inside my stomach cavity,
twisting, growing towards the light coming from my
mouth’s cavern. All green shoots search for the best angle
for light. (Don’t swallow the seeds!)
The watermelon plant would punch through my flesh,
spill out over my pink tongue. Isn’t blood made mostly
of water? You can tell it’s real blood if it dries properly
to a tarnished brown. Stains. Take cold water to it. Fake
blood will just fade to pink like the sheen of the inside of
a clamshell. My mother’s memory
is supposed to fade—it’s genetics, traced back to her
great grandmother’s—ancestral lines show the women
are ransacked of their memories, robbed like pirates
plundering booty, pillaging containers of shining rare
iridescent jewels. Locked boxes of memories. But I am
sure she still remembers why he had a mannequin, naked,
no nipples, but with a blonde wig and lush eyelashes. It’s
in the photograph. Proof. She’s part of the still life, this other
plastic woman. She must have had a name, right? We are all
smiling for some stupid reason. On the porch stoop.
With watermelon.
What I remember is the mouse. Dead. Sides
spilled out; a tiny piece of his intestine glistens. Drying
flecks of blood. The tiniest pink tongue protrudes
from his mouth. It’s the pink of the watermelon’s flesh.
I know it’s dead. But, I still ask. Why didn’t he survive?
Tiny cut. Maybe the mannequin explains: some cuts
go too deep. So much. You can’t recover. Not ever.
After spitting them out, we always had to drag
the green hose from the side of the house to wash
away the seeds. We’d feed the rinds to our imaginary
pigs.
< final version >
STILL LIFE WITH WATERMELON SEEDS, mannequin, DEAD MOUSE
Serrated edge flash shards of light on white walls, carving
up the watermelon slices that drip juice down our thin
brown arms, my father salts his pink slice-smiles, tiny
grains melt in. A neon sign, in my mouth, this shock of fruit-flesh.
Don’t swallow the seeds! he warns & I want to so bad & I’m bad.
Under the covers, eyes shut, I see twisted vines tumble, roots
embed in my stomach’s black, new green shoots slide
over my pink tongue, thick... We spit out the slippery seeds
onto the stone patio. The summer night air quivers & the gash
on her left knee pulses. Watch third person shift focus: so
barely scabbed over, she’ll dig up poems from dirt, she’ll run
all those races, she’s not split, not the furry body opened
on its side, tail limp, she’s not the mouse’s intestine peeping out,
she’s not the one that glistens. The cat’s claw, the hawk’s talon.
What flourishes withers in the heat. In the photograph, all seated
in a row, on the front porch of the log cabin, bodies pixelated,
the mannequin next to her, I mean next to me, is some joke
no one gets. A plastic copy of another body—a jab, perhaps,
at my mother. Blonde wig & lush lashes propped up
next to father on the stoop. Right there. We know what comes
next from practice: drag the coiled green hose from the side of
the house to wash away the seeds.
CM Burroughs
I drafted the original poem in 2018, but it had two subjects going and wasn’t whole. A fair bit later, after wanting more from the poem and having distance from it, I began revising it in the Spring of 2019.
The handwritten draft has more going for it. The repetition of the initial phrasing is something I do when writing by hand; after I conjure a line that has energy, I rewrite, refine, and extend it until I’ve got enough bones to transfer writing to the computer. In this case, I had the concept in mind and took turns at phrasing until I had the start I desired. The poem had aim, and that’s how wayfinding goes—I bumped into walls, or, more accurately, into disappointing language and directions of thought until I had the material to make the poem better.
Ultimately, after a great deal of tinkering, the poem found its precise focus, it aboutness, and its necessary form. I know I’m giving the poem agency there, but sometimes my poems know more than I do; chasing that knowledge takes time and work.
< draft 1 >
supposition
for my mother
Split the pole if you weren’t reared to know
what bridle it brandishes, if you weren’t
mindful when your shadow
loped starkly on one side and your companion’s
on the other.
Better to re-stitch your route (yes—
wholly) to the dividing pine and right
your path than to risk it.
Take the other
side around.
Someone once told me the Other was
overdone. He wasn’t Other but
must’ve gotten tired
of us being pointed out to him
or tired of long-blooded
power cutting his pallor.
Must not have known
the anxiety of belief or how
evil might put its eye on you. Must
never have known a veil.
If I split the pole, I go back because you
never know, go back for the hell of it and
because I honor my mother and my mother’s
mother in choosing, and because love
waits on the other side.
< DRAFT 2 >
< final draft >
supposition
for my mother
Let us admit there has been division enough; our teeth, its simplest
actors.
Let us admit
the past—our translucent bodies’ betrayal: good natures’ good
windows.
We were, weren’t we, moveable?
Series of solid matters sected.
Mid-life and mothered, historical warnings hum, “Don’t split the
pole—”
so as not to forget oneself so as not to be beguiled by the
menagerie present.
For any seer, bisection percusses elemental:
tension then yoke attention
to see oneself and one’s companion starkly on this side of the
divining pine.
If you split the pole,
better to graft your error, better
to right your route than to risk
misfortune’s unrelenting map. For your mother and her mother…
and hers. For the lot of us, the clot of us regarding
the unsteady water, unsteady water in
familial gourds at our feet.
Ama Codjoe
I wrote “Blessing the Vessels” for the Hear Me Now exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibit was primarily composed of pottery made by enslaved potters—named and unnamed—in Edgefield, South Carolina. One of the potters, David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, inscribed verses of poetry and his name into the pots at a time when literacy was illegal for people of African descent.
This is all to say, I felt the task of writing a poem for the exhibit was a sacred task. Four poets, including myself, crafted poems in response to the exhibit and read in the gallery during the last day of the exhibition before it traveled to another museum. My desire to offer a blessing to the pots and the word blessing itself, instantly recalled Lucille Clifton’s poem “Blessing the Boats,” the only poem I can consistently recite by heart. “Blessing the Vessels” composed itself quickly from this point forward.
I moved from the first draft with lines crossed out and additions written in the margins, to a rewriting of the draft which incorporated edits I made and continued to make while composing, to the final typed draft of the poem. Unlike many of the poems I write, the poem felt fully formed in its early iterations. Clifton’s poem provided a container for my efforts and the poem evolved at the same time as it emerged.
< DRAFTS >
< final version >
blessing the vessels
after Lucille Clifton
May you—jug, pot, storage for sustenance—be filled with
a tender gaze. May whatever is hurried, clinical, misapprehending,
or false fall from your back like water. May you retain
your secrets. May you remember your beginning
as clay, as earth, and the nearby rush
of the Savannah—the laughter of its children: the streams.
In each cold room you enter, may the memory of the kiln’s blaze
warm your face. Remember someone, ungloved,
touched you. Turned you round and round. Kept you
from breaking. And when, each night, the visitors leave,
may you rest in the darkness of being unseen.
Gary Jackson
Confession: I’m a slow writer. So slow, a friend once gave me the same advice that Miles Davis gave John Coltrane when Coltrane confessed he didn’t know how to stop playing sometimes: “Try taking the horn out of your fucking mouth.”
I’d like to, but I often don’t know what I’m after when I write the first line or initial scrap of language that blooms into a first draft. “holoprosencephaly” was no different: it started with my desire to understand the disorder that afflicted my sister—a subject I rarely discuss outside poetry. In initial drafts, I incorporated the medical definition and hewed close to the denotative meaning as I folded in other subjects like mutants, superheroes, and exploitation in couplets—intentionally bucking the definition form (which I would later embrace).
Another confession: I love to tinker with things like computer hardware, recipes, syllabi, so it’s no surprise that I love revision. I’m always chasing different angles of access and approach writing with wild abandon. Anything can and may go. So, my “finished” drafts usually look quite different from their original forms. In my early drafts, I realized I had planted seeds to other poems in “holoprosencephaly,” and despite my initial insistence on referencing mutants and superheroes, the poem insisted otherwise. Another learned skill: getting out of the way of what your poems want/need to say.
Three years and twenty-four drafts later, I removed the medical jargon and instead relied on my limited understanding and intimate relationship with holoprosencephaly as a starting point—and the poem became a reckoning, not with just the disorder, but with how little I understood its impact on my mother—something I hadn’t intended to explore. And isn’t that the point? The poem as an act of discovery for both poet and reader.
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photo credit: Ben Chrisman
Poem was previously published in Bennington Review Issue #3, Summer 2017 and origin story: poems by UNM Press 2021.
< early draft >
Holoprosencephaly
(hŏl'ō-prŏs'ěn-sěf'ə-lē)
[holo- + prosencephlaon] failure
of cleavage of the prosencephalon with a deficit in mid
line facial development. Cyclopia occurs in the severe form.
Those affected may share common traits
with Polyphemus (poluphēmos), which in Greek means
famous; as in being in/sub/super/human makes one famous.
Famous as in outcast, as in
exotic, as in
other. The genetic basis is diverse:
caused by mutation in the TGIF, ZIC2, PTCH1,
and/or gli2 genes. An extra copy of chromosome
13: as in mutant
as in Cyclops, as in another famous mutant.
Signs may be
a hard-head newborn no soft
spot great-grandmother recalled.
Characteristically, low-set ears, bilateral cleft
lip and palate, microcephaly, ocular
anomalies, mental retardation. Most die within
the first days or weeks of life.
No cure, but symptoms
are treatable.
< FINAL draft >
Holoprosencephaly
(hŏl'ō-prŏs'ěn-sěf'ə-lē)
noun
