Dessa Bayrock : Ben Robinson and a coffee shop crowded with soldiers

The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews

Like so many other writers and academics, I used to be a barista. Aside from the fact that I needed the money to live, there was something calming about it, something meditative: steps repeated as faithfully as yoga poses. Cup. Steamed milk. Espresso, tamped, cranked into the machine. You can lose yourself in those small moments. You can turn your brain off; you can feel invisible. It’s a strange feeling, almost like dissociation, made even odder by the hustle and bustle of the coffee shop around you; strangers ordering coffee, yes, but also having spirited discussions, bombing first dates, organizing into study groups, yelling about yoghurt, vomiting, apologizing, and moving around one another in indecipherable, zoo-like patterns. 

In “Democracy Is Just the Name of Another Café,” Ben Robinson somehow manages to capture both parts of this experience: a list of odd observations and uncanny interactions conveyed with absolute calm. A meditation on chaos. We, too, are in this crowded coffee shop, overflowing with strangers and strange occurrences. 

But is it really only a coffee shop? The title of the poem is flippant, maybe: democracy is just the name of another café. Democracy would be a great name for a coffee shop, after all. Extremely hip; a logo something like a simplified coat of arms, two crossed arrows dividing a book, a gavel, a mug, a coffee bean. But what happens when we think of this metaphor as a metaphor? What would democracy — cast-your-ballot, everyone-has-a-voice, try-to-build-a-better-world-together democracy — look like as a coffee shop?

In this poem, Robinson writes it “full of cops / and soldiers in uniform”. He writes it with a parade outside. Democracy, he seems to say, has become a militarized space, and while cops and soldiers celebrate in the streets and coffee shop alike, an unnamed and un-uniformed stranger “vomits at the bus stop”.  

I want to tell this stranger that, more and more, this is how democracy makes me feel, too. Months deep in both a pandemic and the largest civil rights movement of our time, the actions and inactions of our government feel nauseating to the touch. How else to rebel, to refuse, to exorcise? 

And meanwhile this café — this hip, hipster Democracy — continues serving cappuccinos. I imagine the clientele would be much the same as my old coffee shop: businessmen with starched cuffs rolled companionably to the elbows, hot young moms with yoga mats strapped to their backs, students with laptops and headphones that cost more than a full month’s rent. Sure, Democracy has a ramp fitted over the front step for accessibility; it has washrooms large enough to fit a wheelchair; it has multilingual and patient baristas. But who is Democracy serving? 

Like my old coffee shop, I suspect the patrons are largely white, and comfortably employed, and able-bodied. Like my old coffee shop, I’m sure the baristas are thankful that they work at Democracy in this location, and not the sister café location a mere six blocks further downtown — a store we fondly referred to as “the pointy shoe district,” where the customers are richer, and even more uptight, and tip even worse. Because it can always get worse. 

Meanwhile this coffee shop is crowded with soldiers. The other patrons in the coffee shop diminish, become something less than human. “A raccoon buys me a cappuccino,” Robinson narrates, although of course it’s not a raccoon but a person, a man who regales Robinson with “stories of his life / as a young Sandinista” — which is to say, a man who was a member of a socialist political party which ruled Nicaragua in the 80s and 90s. According to Wikipedia, the Sandinista National Liberation Front “instituted a policy of mass literacy, devoted significant resources to health care, and promoted gender equality, but came under international criticism for human rights abuses, mass execution and oppression of indigenous peoples” (np).* This man is no longer a soldier, we gather. He has given up his uniform and become something else. He buys Ben Robinson a cappuccino. Disguised as — or transformed into — a raccoon, he poses no risk to the soldiers, to us, or to Democracy. But here the lesson feels underscored: to trust in those in power is a mistake. It is tempting to overlook the bad in favour of the good, but this spells danger for those unable to escape into the safety of a coffee shop and a good cappuccino.

I can so perfectly imagine sitting in my old café and watching the parade go by. I can feel Ben Robinson leaning over my shoulder and whispering in my ear as we watch thousands of uniformed men pacing as one, their many legs like an unending centipede. “And remember,” Robinson says under his breath, “if it barks like a dog / and has 40,000 unflappable teeth / tread carefully”. It is a good lesson. We would perhaps be wise to remember the sharp teeth hidden in the soft mouths of the soldiers parading outside, their canines sheathed but hungry nonetheless.

But who am I to say that Democracy is an exclusive space? No one walks around policing the students who spent $3 on a drip coffee five hours ago, or the woman who comes in and pours the whole container of milk into her travel mug, or the man who smells horribly of urine. Belonging can be easy, Robinson seems to say, or else safety can be faked; he walks to the carafe of icy, lemon-scented water put out by the employees every morning and pours some into one of the small plastic tumblers stacked beside it. It is the single free beverage available to all, here in Democracy, and you may help yourself even when every other thing on the menu remains tauntingly out of reach. When the soldiers grow bored with the street and enter the coffee shop, Robinson passes this glass to you swiftly. “Quick, take this cup / of water and pour it inside yourself” Robinson says, “or you shall surely die.” 

The soldiers see your mouth meet the rim of the glass and pass over you harmlessly. You are a customer. You are above reproach. 

Democracy, after all, welcomes everyone. 

*“Sandinista National Liberation Front.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 July 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front.

Please do not cite Wikipedia in actual academic papers. This is a bad practice and probably shouldn’t even be popularized even in this small way. Love, your friendly neighbourhood PhD candidate. 

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.

Dessa Bayrock : Misha Solomon, milk envy, and other riddles of parenting and jealousy

The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews

For a long time, I disliked children. What, really, is to like about them? They’re tiny people who don’t have their shit together, and don’t know how to get it together, and — worst of all — have almost zero impetus to get it together. They’re loud, scattered, overemotional, and constantly in need of attention. 

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.

Dessa Bayrock : Razielle Aigen and the inside, the outside

The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews

There is perhaps no better time than a global pandemic to think about what it means to be inside, to be outside, to be somehow caught between the two. This is precisely what Razielle Aigen’s poem “From the Outside” (from her chapbook light waves the leaves, above/ground press, February 2020) struggles with, struggles against, struggles into: a poem which is “creating / a loophole, a visual / palindrome in which / rain rains on either side / of a windowpane.” 

We’re all acquainted with windows: one side is out and the other is in, and we sit in and look out. In this poem, however, Aigen begins to think of what it looks like when the outside, somehow, appears on both sides of the glass. The barrier hasn’t been broken down, but it has been circumvented, somehow. Is in still in? Is out still out? What happens if—or when—one becomes the other? Can in and out remain distinct from one another if they cohabitate or fall in love? What happens when these seeming immutable barriers suddenly become mutable?

These are perhaps familiar questions, posed not only by this poem, but by constraints on current living. I hardly need to tell you that the majority of us are stuck in our homes, leaving only for vital work or necessary errands before quickly returning inside. All of our narratives, understandably, have become inside-centric, and there is danger in something being purely internal—a one-sidedness that becomes an overgrown tangle with nowhere to go. I think most of us would recognize this as a self-evident truth of these times, pointing to our own restlessness, anxiety, fear, and loneliness as the proof of forced inside-ness gone awry, gone too far. 

How, then, might we imagine “a process of / overriding the insiding”, as Aigen puts it? The truth of the matter is that no one wants to be stuck inside, whether “inside” is a one-bedroom apartment or the walls of a single mind, unable or unwilling to emerge or communicate with whatever’s on the other side of the glass. It poses questions we might all be obsessed with: how can something that belongs outside be forced inside and still survive? How can we once again bring what is inside into a sphere where it can be shared, understood, or even loved?

Fittingly, then, the joy and excitement and driving force of this poem come from an instant in which these barriers seemingly disappear; even hidden within, the poet can be seen: as the poet’s lover repeats throughout the poem, “this is really you.”  

The poet brushes this off, mostly, but still feels compelled to “open all the windows and doors”—in other words, to dispel the barriers as much as possible, and continue growing closer to her lover. Together, the two of them begin to call out the things they see through these newly-opened portals—the birds, the plants—and begin naming them anew, as though they are Adam in the garden of Eden on the first day of the first spring. This naming feels monumental, captivating, somehow mythical in the way that reminds us: names have power. 

Stuck inside my one-bedroom apartment, it’s easy to see how this is a power we all have and yet all too easily forget. Aigen seeks to remind us of this power: the power not just to look but to see, and to understand and to know through our conscious, purposeful seeing. Put another way: how often have I stared out my balcony windows but not seen anything I’m looking at?

Perhaps we can rediscover this blessing, then, even stuck inside our lonely boxes for the foreseeable future. What are the names for the birds and trees outside the windows we stare at, day after day? What will it take to throw those windows open and to recognize what we see? 

Aigen writes:

pine-sparrow. walnut-lark. 

maple-pheasant. birch-

starling. holy oak! 

their shapes are pleasing. 

we are at ease. […]

we can’t explain what’s 

happening.

But her lover can, and does:

“I’m getting to know you,” she says “from the inside.”

There’s such joy in these sparse lines, and of course there is—because Aigen is not just looking out of her window, but out of herself. The poet becomes one with the world outside her window, but also begins to dissolve the barrier between her thoughts and her lover’s thoughts — and between her self and her lover’s self. The poet, too, is seen, and named, and understood. 

The end of the poem tangles all the threads of this discourse up beautifully: Aigen and her lover grow closer and closer in their separate understandings until it becomes a single understanding, falling into bed or into love, the clear boundaries between their bodies and words becoming blurred, forgotten, mutable. Love erases the barrier between inside and outside, blending both together into something that simply is.

So too is naming—or even just seeing—an action which transcends the boundary between the inner and the outer; a name, after all, is the shortest possible shorthand to signal knowledge of something or someone. By vocalizing our internal understandings, we make those understandings external, public—shared. Nested in her lover’s arms, this becomes clear even to Aigen, who tells us, at the end, that “by way of naming, we are / creating, we put it / outside.” 

She describes, then, the translation we all seek: from unspoken to spoken, from inside to outside. Even in the times we feel most stuck, Aigen seems to say, we can create connections out of seemingly nothing — building a vivid, shared reality out of the knowledge “nestled / on the inside, a hologram / of what we know is / happening.”

And so this poem has a message for this time of self-isolation: throw open the doors and windows. We can’t leave the inside, whether we take that to mean our homes or our heads. But we can open our eyes to see and our mouths to speak, and listen to our names for things twining together outside like garden snakes in the grass — verdant, gentle, flexible, and so very, beautifully, inarguably together. 

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.