The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad
student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews
And yet: children are also creative, and hilarious,
and occasionally fill their little bodies with so much love and surprising
tenderness that their capacity for goodness seems impossible, illegal,
miraculous. Children, somehow, are the best and worst of us: tiny tornadoes of
unrestrained impulsivity, whether for good or ill.
Misha Solomon’s poem “Milk Envy” perfectly sums up
these feelings about children: how irritating and horrible they are, and yet
how vital and precious. It’s a fine balance to strike, and one that most poems
about children seem to shy away from; it’s hard to write about hatred and make
it into a poem about love, and yet Solomon does exactly that. “Milk Envy” is
brilliant, honest, and also, frankly, a relief — to witness someone else’s
confession that yes, children are truly unlikeable, and that these feelings of
annoyance can exist simultaneously with loving them.
Although it’s not explicitly stated, I imagine this
poem takes place in a waiting room — the kind of waiting room we’ve all been
in, time after time, in which a child just won’t stop crying. “your child is
screaming,” Solomon writes, the first line of the first and longest stanza.
“he’s not even crying / just screaming / in a vague imitation of sadness”.
There are so many things to dislike about this scene, and Solomon dives deeply
into what can be uncomfortable or even taboo territory: that children are
annoying, and we, the innocent bystanders, are expected to endure it. “your
child keeps dropping his numbered tiles,” Solomon writes, in a tone both
vicious and bored. “your child can’t seem to put his tiles in order / your
child is a fucking idiot / untalented at both art and science”.
This is where the poem begins to build its complexity;
after all, this isn’t just about hating loud children and their half-hearted
bad-actor screams for attention, although it is definitely also that, but also about
the ways in which this feeling of intense dislike can be shared or transformed —
even by parents themselves. “and you / you don’t even seem to like him / all
that much” Solomon realizes, addressing the parent in question, seemingly
shocked, satisfied, and annoyed by this development. “you look at me and smile
sheepishly and roll your eyes in his direction / as if to say: / sorry about my
fucking idiot child / he is untalented at art and science / I know / and I hate
him for it”.
For a second, it feels as if this shared hatred will
bring these two strangers together — a tender moment of connection at the
expense of this annoying kid. The poem could end here, if it wanted to, in this
perfect vignette of commiseration.
But Solomon isn’t done yet; rather than allow the
parent the easy escape of commiseration, he spits out another satisfyingly mean
take-down of the parent, insulting their “balding husband” and his “slimy cock”
which “produced / the worst actor I’ve ever seen” – namely, this screaming
child who isn’t even sad, but merely imitating sadness, and doing it badly.
But here comes a surprising shift in tone within the
same stanza, before the reader can catch their breath to laugh at the
proverbial slimy cock.
“I’ve been fucked too you know / and I’ve fucked”,
Solomon says, quieter now, a confession that reads as strangely mournful. “and
never have I produced / a child”.
There is something like a muted pride in these lines,
but also somehow a confession of loss, of unsurity, of possibilities which have
been avoided or unanswered. never have I produced a child. Is this Solomon’s
way of apologizing, condemning, or mourning? It could be any of the above. In
many ways, it feels like all three.
This shift cracks something open in the poem, and here
we begin to crest the last loop of the roller coaster, ripping away the facade
of Solomon’s judgmental dislike and beginning to show us, the reader, what this
scene has perhaps been about from the first. Because this parent does love
their child — a depth of emotion that can’t be undone or obscured by sheepish
smile or a roll of the eyes. “You hug your screaming, idiot child,” Solomon
narrates, which at first reads as a critique but then, perhaps, as a
realization. “You hug your screaming, idiot child, / hold him close to your
breast, / where he surely suckled you raw, // and my nipples ache with jealous
rage.”
Here, then, finally,
is where the riddle unravels: the place where hatred shields love, or else
belies love as the other side of a shared coin. The jealous truth hides behind
intense dislike, behind pride, behind rage, behind aching nipples, but emerges
to be heard: every “screaming, idiot child” has a place on this earth, even if
it is not with us. This realization is both a blessing, for those of us who
never want to produce children, and a moment of grief, for those whose “nipples
ache with jealous rage”. It is a poignant moment, amidst the satisfying
meanness and hilarity of Solomon’s diatribe against this horrible actor, this
screaming kid in this hypothetical waiting room, and it sits quietly at the end
of the poem on its own. The truth revealed, there is nothing more to be said on
the matter, and so, too, the poem winds to its finish: “You hold him close, /
and exchange smiles, / and I get up and go.”
Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats and a
variety of succulents, one of which occasionally blooms. She used to fold and
unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a
PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. Her work
has appeared in Funicular, PRISM, and Poetry Is Dead, among others, and her
work was recently shortlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. She is
the editor of post ghost press. You can find her, or at least more about her,
at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa.
