Karisma Price: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This Is a Song for the Good Girl (Or the Lonely)

 

I draw a black band on my arm with Sharpie

Mourn for America they say

Say! Say Mami with the braids. I like ’em short!

My mom is the only number in my Recents call log

I now understand why Saturn devoured his son

I sleep with the TV on to combat loneliness

Today my cousin turns seven in a twice-drowned city

Every year I tell him he’s a grown man

Lying runs in my family

My sister steals a graham cracker

Animal control comes to put her down

We found a gun in my dead aunt’s bedroom

The silence hangs over us

like a guillotine’s blade

I dream of fish and close my legs

I stopped playing the alto saxophone

The president threatens to drop a bomb

It felt too close to giving birth

The earth holds me like a dead snake in the grass

Each of my days is a failed manifesto

I clench my jaw as to hold myself

Who will Jodeci cry for me as I undo my twist out

What is a man but a pocket

full of rose thorns

They are always so afraid to bleed

I do it without being asked

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Karisma Price is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Four Way Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. 

[Jodeci is an American R&B quartet formed in 1988 in Charlotte, North Carolina.]

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                                    William H. Johnson, Little Girl in Orange, ca. 1944, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Comments

[Bill Nevins]

"The earth holds me like a dead snake in the grass

Each of my days is a failed manifesto

I clench my jaw as to hold myself"

BRILLIANT!!!!!

[Lara Egger]

Gorgeous poem! Beautifully straddles the line between the public and the private. Just stunning!

[Abbie Mulvihill]

I have read this poem over and over again. Each time I read, “ Animal control comes to put her down” I am struck by the pain of those words. What an excellent poem!

[Thomas O'Grady]

Yes, this is definitely a keeper!

[lally]

tough as bitten nails, terrific poem and post

[Beth Joselow]

Outstanding and heart-breaking.

[Martin Stannard]

My sister steals a graham cracker

Animal control comes to put her down

I have no idea if those two lines are meant to be read in tandem but they are an absolute joy.

Great poem.

[Clarinda]

Disturbing quotient:10
Beauty quotient:10
Lasting power quotient: 10

[Jack Skelley]

A kind of "list poem" -- but seemingly random. Love it. thank u.

[Grace Cavalieri]

And to write this is a beautiful vindication.

[Susan Campbell]

Tough andcool.

[Don Berger]

What a fabulous poem, a glorious mountain of shorter poems, which I’ll reread dozens of times, I’m certain. Great pick Mister Winch, what singing from you Karisma!

[Terence Winch]

Don:  Thanks for the comment.

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

Powerful!

[Eileen Reich]

Wonderful poem. Mourn for America they say….

[Nin Andrews]

Wow! Love it!!

[David Lehman]

Let me single out: "The silence hangs over us / like a guillotine’s blade."

[Geoffrey Himes]

I love the way each line seems to suggest a follow-up line, which doesn't come, replaced by another line that suggests a new direction, which is discarded for a new path.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

Karisma Price’s poem is a skewering but never shrill song of lamentation from “the good girl” a/k/a “the lonely.” It’s a far deeper plumbing of the ague sometimes associated with the adage “let no good deed go unpunished.” Her poem brilliantly delivers a series of binaries, often starting in malaise or mischief and just as often ending in the macabre: “My sister steals a graham cracker / Animal control comes to put her down” and, more compactly, “I dream of fish and close my legs.” Even the binary of “I clench my jaw as to hold myself / Who will Jodeci cry for me as I undo my twist out” tucks a reference to R&B group Jodeci, who had a huge hit single in 1993 with “Cry for You.” The last four lines of the poem deliver the denouement: “What is a man but a pocket / full of rose thorns / They are always so afraid to bleed / I do it without being asked.” She’ll have none of that endless male “beggin’ ” found at the end of Jodeci’s song “Cry for You.” This is the Price poem men have to pay. Even her first name, Karisma, summons up “charisma,” which in Christian theology denotes a divinely inspired gift, grace, or talent especially for prophesying or healing. The name fits.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle. Wonderful comment.