To be embarrassingly honest, I was a little frightened to actually sit down with Last Seen, by Jacqueline Jones LaMon. It’s a collection about African American children who have gone missing, and I worried that the mother in me would not be able to take it. I spent a moment in crisis after glancing one of the titles in Section Two: “For My Husband, Who Took Our Daughter to the Park So I Could Get Some Rest, Then Fell Asleep and Awakened to an Empty Stroller.”
But how often do I find myself talking about the importance of risk in writing, the value of writing into one’s own fears and unrest? And shouldn’t the corollary to that commitment have something to do with reading what puts us on edge, listening to what we are afraid to hear?
I read the book this morning while my daughter sat in the bed beside me watching Sesame Street on my computer. Every now and then my hand reached out to touch her small foot—a gesture of gratitude and something more. These poems were making me feel the quietly pervasive absence of wholeness in the world, the same world she is learning to navigate and will one day race, unmediated, to greet. When that time comes, she will be as prepared as anyone can be—I’ll see to it. But what will she, like every single one of the rest of us, lose in the exchange?
Last Seen is not a book that slams or shocks you. It does nothing gratuitous with facts, is not trying to make you shut up and hear what you have been refusing to hear. It is not journalistic, waving a microphone in somebody’s face. It is not angry or agitated, waving picket signs or petitions. It whispers. It is a book that pushes a reader’s thoughts inward toward the small human truths we as watchers of the nightly news or scanners of milk cartons or shakers of heads don’t make much time to consider. Not distant statistical truths, but our own private ones, painful and unuttered.
I think the book achieves this very special, very difficult balance, by beginning with what feels like a look at a self, or selves. The first section, “Polygraph: The Control Questions,” contains a sequence of poems with titles like “Who are you and whom do you love?,” “How will you begin?” and “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” The poems such questions trigger are private, with a speaker who reflects on specific moments from what feels like an ordinary life: a party her parents threw the night before she was born, a prank phone call made in response to a childish dare, DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn at dawn. But in each of these poems is a discernible loss. Her father’s colleague died suddenly at the party. The prank call caused a family brief but heart-wrenching grief. Morning brings with it a palpable if unnamed heartache. See, LaMon seems to be telling her readers, every life is rent by disappearances. The unspeakable comes to us all. I think this opening tone is crucial, for it prevents the reader from buffering herself by adopting a stance of pity. See, LaMon reminds us, you have gone missing, too.
The missing-children sequences, entitled “The Elsewhere Chronicles,” and “The San Francisco Sonnets” are run-through with incredible empathy. Of course, a great deal is afforded the victims, whose stories we will never truly know. In “How the Bryant Boy Will Know” LaMon addresses a child who has been adopted out of dire circumstances, reminding him “You are someone’s missing boy.” In “Inheritance,” she seems to address the unwitting victim of an abduction:
You believe you are certain
of your lineage. You think
you are balding in the same pattern
as your brother, your uncle.
You pull up weeds at night.
……………………………………….
You scratch until you bleed.
A poem in the voice a missing girl’s cousin reveals how different her grief is from that of other family members. Such poems pick up where an outsider’s imagination tends to trail off, and in so doing they manage to place a complex spin on the realities they consider.
But LaMon is also courageous enough to write from this place of empathy where another writer might be more comfortable allowing her rage to guide her. In “Two Waffles and a Tall Glass of Milk,” an uncomfortable 26 line poem about a child abductor honing in on a runaway girl, LaMon writes into and through the unspeakable, forcing us to sit still and listen to the voice of someone we’d rather write off as flatly deranged, inhuman:
…………………………………………..He wanted this one
quiet, willed it. Nothing to remind him of weather vanes,
regrets, the man he’d never be. Something tugged inside.
Some song, low moan beneath the kitchen, where Cook
Took his runaways on thunderous, closed-in nights.
“Until You Come Back to Me,” or so he thought, his mind
veering from one of her bare shoulders to the other.
Coming in as an interlude between the manuscript’s second and fourth sections, which focus upon the missing is “Boy Met Girl,” nine poems imagining first encounters for a couple described only as Julie and Freddy, “who never divulged how they met.” These nine abecedarians (a formal feature that slipped my notice until the word “xylophone” popped up for the second time in six pages) are, at heart, elegies marking another kind of loss: that of family, and the private knowledge each individual takes out of the world at death.
There is much more to say about this beautiful and haunting book. It is moving, edifying and deeply troubling. Its final section, which returns to the metaphor of the polygraph, asks a series of broad, existential questions similar to those which opened the book. But this time around, a reader has different tools with which to answer them. One question which resonates particularly powerfully at the book’s close is “What are the consequences of silence?” In Last Seen, LaMon speaks into and from our collective silence, and fills the air with what we have been living deaf to for too long.
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