1.7.16

The following poems are by Monica Ferell. A nice quotation from poetryfoundation.org encapsulates the style: "Her allusive poems often seem to molt, revealing vulnerable, raw skin caught mid-transformation. In a 2008 interview for Sarabande Press, Ferrell discussed the role of uncertainty in her work, stating, “I’m trying to let something that wants to come into being do so—poetry as uncovering, rather than invention or rhetoric, and a form of devotion and service.' " Lets see some of what's inside. 


Emma Bovary



I would have liked then for someone to touch me
So I could know the purpose of this hardship.
Black-eyed and impassive as a canyon,
From the hive of my mind, I looked at their faces 
As I moved between rows of espaliered pears.
I only intended for someone to show
Me, once, an affection like the sun
Shows even the simplest bulb, entering what’s hidden.
Let me show them instead the picture
In a knife’s reflection, take down my hair
Where the gravedigger kneels among new potatoes.
Behind my teeth are headstones, and behind those
Skeletons of cavemen, of dinosaurs,
And under my skin: alphabets, alphabets
In black ink, a legacy of histories tiny and alive
As an ant army marching toward forever.
Understand, please—I, too, have a splendid use,
This world could not get rid of me if it wanted to.




Geburt des Monicakinds

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table

Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare

Of electric lights and a strange arranged

 

Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.

I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters

On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.

 

I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,

Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face

Which did not yet know struggle, burden;

 

How the look of newborns unnerves. Then

They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun

Still too small to throw up into the sky.

 

 

              It was midnight when they injected me

With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox

Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth

 

Saying, these. Now it was contracted to a drop:

And in the morning I knew both death and life.

Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my

 

Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like

Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads

Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.

This last one is especially transformative. I enjoyed as I read how my perspective seemed to shift between that of a new baby and that of the new mother.