folio : short takes on the prose poem
I don't really love sweeping statements about what poetry should or shouldn’t, does or doesn’t do, so I am only speaking on what I do in my prose poetry, knowing and hoping that others see things differently.
Prose poetry is a container that I use for a variety of reasons depending on the project. Sometimes, prose feels necessary when a subject is too difficult, weighty, or psychologically heavy to be given much white space, or the lightness that can come from stanzas, though sometimes only moments in a poem/essay-hybrid require this, and I'll move between stanzas and prose structures within a piece. Sometimes I want the content to be physically contained, as it is in the mind or dream or memory, and so gather my prose poems into small boxes on the page, as is the case with many of the poems in my forthcoming book of surrealist prose poetry, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, Spring 2022). Sometimes I find prose-like sentence structure and punctuation is required as a grounding force, when the poem risks flight and needs an anchor. Sometimes the prose form signals a continuation between poems, a narrative being loosely formed. Mostly though, I find prose poems enable my questions, more than any other poetic form. It is where I am most comfortable asking without the pressure of answers.
These poems are from a new sequence I have started playing with recently.
I ask my group chat
if I can send the document, go about my day, a comma like an inverted wave scooping rhythm away from shore. Sometimes I want my life to be jagged, an em-dash, because that's a line I've always lived on. I loved the changing fence lines just as much as I didn't. One the dogs dug under. Another made of brush. One electric. One just woods, or none at all, or a dock a mile away my friend and I, what was her name, stepped off onto ice despite seeing through to water. My barrier is both road and forest now, a curling ellipsis I'd keep close if I knew how, but no, delete that. I want surety. The surety of change. The snow piling up on the bannister until you can't believe it's not toppled over. Shall I send it? Get my sleeve wet? Make this transience immovable in the cold. Send away. Unsent message. Sent.
My older sister asked me
did you have sex, as I walked into the hotel room at six a.m., and I said no. She turned over and went back to sleep, next to our mother. In the shower, I cried silently and washed the blood off my inner thighs. On the deck, five years later, I told them, and my mother's eyes were blank and shiny. Once, after, I had sex with my high school boyfriend and when I saw myself in the full-length mirror I started crying. My bangs were too short. I would lay in a dark bedroom sobbing until my crew of friends arrived each weekend, and then I'd come out, salty, smiling, and ready to party. I used to bleed, still bleed, still shower, still lie, still cry. My experience slipped down the hotel drain. I feel bad for it. What would have changed if I'd have said yes, cried openly, showed the blood on my legs. Would I have cried less before parties, after parties, during sex, after sex, before work, still bleeding? Would I have clotted and processed the scab? Would the scab have fallen off, picked but witnessed, instead of stitched and re-stitched and unseen in private care for years? There is salt-water flooding the wound. Salt you contain, except, alone.
My
little sister asks me
after
Sanna Wani
if I remember when I realized I could die and I don’t, but I wish I did. Did I even think as a child? Do I even think now? So much of my world develops like a photograph, in the dark room way back and is fully formed before I realize it has been there floating in chemicals I assembly-line walk by. The buckets of the segments of my brain. If I think in words, I don't know them. If I knew I could die, I was okay with it. I don't think it ever bothered me, ass on tile floor. That sounds like a brag, but it isn't. I tell my sister I feel like I have no memory sometimes. I spit shine my own eyes so they'll see something. The snow I forgot was falling. The ice I walked on weeks too early. If I realized I could die, I don't remember it. It's not my death that worries me. It's yours. If my lake isn't solid, maybe yours is. Yours is. Yours is. No one else can die because the ice is just a photograph I took in high school. I think I need to go home.
