Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech. Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Happy summer, and enjoy!
A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech
Essay as yes,
begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from).
Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text? In his anagram notebooks, Saussure said God(s) and named names. Of this, the scholar writes, “Language’s tokens make sense because they cor-respond.” Raise your hand if you’re who here can’t hear the heart.
Under wraps, rapture, sous rature’s insistent autocorrect. The trace createth (archaic ache) Zürn’s “old, dangerous fever,” Mackey’s “exegetic sweat”: open (source, sesame, letter, book). Pen, stain one mouth [and] the mountain opens. Bromine cant: recombinant. The lab in labial, the utter in, well, utter. Late tale: I hold the same old doll as me. Not a simulacrum left that the bad birds haven’t pecked up, antipathetic, now violet night, violent insight. Cite anti-path as no road home, lips lit [to] spill it.
It turns out, it doesn’t matter what we want to want because the spell still (ill saint) outs us, solves for scar in viscera where viscera is crave, cavity-crammed. Still an I, I was trying to write a beginning and an ending at once, using the only words my tongue could touch. Muddle and middle. The writing on the wall was a tunnel under cell-scratched time. Say law [of] always: simultaneous is nauseous limits. They weren’t all mine to spill, and even their spooled length unfurled and measured didn’t feel like all at all. Totality of utterance reduced to trance, to tatter.
Note burden’s sense, too, as refrain, as what we carry singing down the road. Love me little, love me long’s the bindle shouldered by that us that must end anonymous, bound to the stone of a song. With, across, after: referred myself to a different doctor, wielded the old ax in ask, metathetic. Closed eyes and metalept: hung for a moment in the air from where the bridge I burned once was. The best I could do was an embarrassment, crying for do-over blushes reread, reacts in redactions. Or is it that the space was always there, and necessary, not absence but aperture, artery’s foramen, foreman speaking for the jury?
Waved, left: laved weft, crosswise threads of a cloth washed and wrung, hung to dry on an over-under. An old story, spun whole cloth: blue banner shook upstage to make the sea’s surge billow back the act. The sine was swell and sag. The sine was pregnant, pause, pregnant, pause. Called hum [sic], hone [sic], a song sharpened in the singing, then ground to gone. Sic transit authority (see [sic] changes in signage): mind the [God of the] gap[s]. I always forgot the second I in liaison, and the screen scratched its red line ragged below our best in trysts [sic] (something in us) as I tried to make a dance of distance, move on. Something thumb sings of tapping into: the smallest screen’s green flame, time-stamped out but still smoldering, or, hinge-stung, the rise in bruise as blood’s chorus roars out its resistance. It’s not exactly the same seam, but remove or rearrange and the trace remains, asks after, echoes back into and of its origins—
_____________
I do
After Meg Ronan
Never meant, never meat, never met.
Try a break. Buckle up. Weary query
gut put after all. A last jab, haze, hex.
Beneath the mattress, guns. Stutter.
Stumble, crazy easy. Keep just a fuck,
bequeath the rest. Laws vex, amaze –
all next level parlay. Bet a jester’s last
laugh. Full cuff freeze, luck up a sleeve,
squats, lunges. But we came bulletless.
_____________
After Plath: Metaphors I
[I’m a riddle in nine syllables,]
Stealing a safe view, interstate
still a smooth read, nothing in
mirrors, not need or glint, not even
a least glimmer in the rims of a coupe
so far. An on ramp's best offer is belief,
yes, spell an easy does it and I bite,
finally sing assent, an infinity.
Big rig, add a deep rumble now,
the true coup down the highway.
____________
After Plath: Metaphors II
[An elephant, a ponderous house,]
Not to faint at blood, a creeping
up in the syringe, I avert my eyes then
run, or else. I'll feint so at a mind's
view, my unlit corners. My wild
ape meat is a treif menu in a red pen.
I’d eat. I see a starting pistol's first
green shoot, a bean's beginning in
a fêted barrel, a flash and slosh,
swim of a goldfish bowl on the go.
______________
After Plath: Metaphors IV
[O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!]
Aviary, apiary, one warm swarm
and flutter. Bubble tea, puff pastry,
lit fuse, ore. I reel, dine asea.
Greeting card sentiments, honey
dripping into the moss-lined nest
of a loon, wings riled in the offing.
Motor revs, then idles. A magician's
assistant, smiling to be sawed in half,
saying I'll be the one, the one too.
_____________
After Plath: Metaphors V
[This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.]
A nature documentary. Opening
shot, pan, a narrator’s measured
tone intent on saying stab, storm,
life, flap, ash, bone, tool, till, life,
death. So yes, as I listen, I begin
to believe I’m the whole sorry
shebang, finding my mess the stained
sign of an entire paradigm. I, inverted
flower we call fruit, fig wasp inside.
After Plath: Metaphors VII
[I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.]
Mob's all thumbs in the Colosseum,
meat thrown to a dull roar as gears
engage, meat in a trendy blender.
A spy in internal affairs, other shoe
dropping, in me, it's pints of rennet
in a stein, gift pony, baloney sandwich
with a side of live wires, eel's vitals,
fine dust, fine lines—fine. I'm
a gag order to go. Bye. Ate it.
