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.