The Nepotist

In "Aubade: Incantation at a Closed Window," Tarfia Faizullah writes: "Do not mistake / love for bowls of orchids, their frantic couplings. / Frog girl, how do you love? Water, water, water, / a thimble rusted over, mussed sheets piled in their corner."  The entire poem is written in this gentle, imperative mood.  As such, the poem reads as if the poet has written these instructions chiefly to herself.  The effect of that is one of tender self-awareness.  

In both of these poems you'll be smitten with Tarfia's precise, poignant imagery and the distinct outline these lyrics cut across the landscape of the page, like an undeniable outline of a trees between a prairie and the wide sky above.  "Remember how the sky / felt on that concrete rooftop, softer / because of the damp and draped lines / of your mother's saris? That happened / to you, and not me, but I am still young / enough to live without rage," Tarfia writes.  These poems are ripe with undeniable truths and empathies that need only be spoken, not deciphered.  

Thanks, Tarfia.

***

Aubade: Incantation at a Closed Window

Crack it open—look out to wet ferns

flattened in wet cement. Watch for painted

lines of curved streets, the lone apostle

always on his corner, struggling stacks

of damp Bibles. Recall spring—its damaged

communions, inbred blooms. Do not mistake

love for bowls of orchids, their frantic couplings.

Frog girl, how do you love? Water, water, water,

a thimble rusted over, mussed sheets piled

in their corner. Place each picture facedown,

tap the walls with a crimson feather. Fill

the red bowl with cracked shells. Let those

rooms these ghosts inhabit stay latched. Remain

here, in this room instead, where twilight wets

the exposed window while the metronome is ticking.  

***

Adulthood

Always I want to please

you. Black hairs ring the sink

I wash my face in, and there is

always a larger thing that must

be folded, swept away. You

bring the diet pills, Mother,

and I'll bring the garam masala.

We'll wander grocery aisles

like we used to, though they are

empty of what will please you:

we'll make do with chopped

garlic for paste, jalapenos

for a thin, curled chili: a child

will skip stones in the parking lot,

and I will finally wrap that scarf

over my head, tuck it safe beneath

my chin. Remember how the sky

felt on that concrete rooftop, softer

because of the damp and draped lines

of your mother's saris? That happened

to you, and not me, but I am still young

enough to live without rage. Everywhere

I have tried to go is the same heavy

morning washed low with milk tea.

Bring the henna paste, Mother,

and I'll bring the cigarettes. We'll

sit on red cushions and fan each

other's river-wet hands. Only now

I understand that sorrow resigns

itself to yellow stars of forsythia,

thin cracks in burnt wood: this sadness

shaped like a knocked-over table. What

I want to know is how you know me:

the tree in the park graffitied over

with initials, my hand on the killing

knife, guiding it slowly forward.

*** 

About the Poet:

I am a graduate of VCU's creative writing program, and the former associate editor of blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. My poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Diode, Bellingham Review and elsewhere. I am the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project award, the Ploughshares Cohen Award, and a Fulbright scholarship.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

Upon resuscitation at the shores of Jumeirah Beach in Dubai after a freak accident involving a beach ball and suntan lotion, Weldon Kees found himself in the body of one Anna Nicole Smith. He sat up, tossed back long, peroxide-blond locks, and looked around. "What year is it," he rasped in a soft Texan accent. "What kind of poetry is being written?" he implored of his rescuer, a young man clad only in a purple speedo and Gucci sunglasses. Shaking off his rescuer, he stood up, and staggered to the water's edge. "I must...become...the Nepotist. Before it's too late!" As he spoke, he noticed a young woman in a lounge chair, thumbing idly through A Night Without Armor, by someone named Jewel. Falling to his knees, his perfect breasts barely quivering, he screamed to the sky, "You maniac poets! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

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The best compliment one writer can give another is to tell him that he's written something you wish that you had written.  Good poets may borrow, and great poets may indeed steal, but The Nepotist's job is to publish and to gush, and gush I will over these three epigrams (and dammit if I didn't wish I wrote them myself).  While Daniel's bio points to other, more sober poetries, it's a mistake to read these short, tight poems, give a smile or a smirk in reaction, and then forego them in favor of Daniel's 'poker-faced literary work.' The short, self-contained poem is the most difficult of all poems to compose.  Try your own approximation of these if you doubt me: Start with a concept that closes onto itself.  Now add rhyme and meter.  Now make it witty and incisive.  See what I mean?  These are exquisite, quotable, and oh so very keen.  

Thanks, Daniel.

***

SAVANT

I was working while you were sleeping.
I'll be talking with my sources
While you stem your wife's weeping.

Through my bloodless veins courses
Ambition and diet Sprite.
Your fat children dream of horses.

***

CELEBRITIES

Brad left Jen, and all the publicists were mad,
But you're not Jen, and I'm not Brad.

***

AN IDEALIZATION

You're an endless line
I'm moving slowly along.
There's no curve or design.
You're infinitely long.


***

About the Poet:

These are 3 of Daniel Lin's epigrams. For a look at his more somber, serious, poker-faced literary work visit the new issues of Octopus (www.octopusmagazine.com) and Sink Review (www.sinkreview.org), as well as the latest print issue of Notre Dame Review. He runs Love Among the Ruins, a small press based in NYC that produces poetry chapbooks and a literary journal (www.loveamongtheruins.com).


On the identity of The Nepotist:

My first guess is Josh Mehigan, though he's kind of busy learning theory in grad school. Or Jill Alexander Essbaum, but she's probably watching Lost or writing a novel. Jessica Piazza seems a likely candidate (who else knows Eric McHenry AND me?) but she swears it isn't her. It's a kerfuffle.

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You know what it's time for?  It's time for an ars poetica. And what an example The Nepotist has to post for you today.  What I have to say about Laura Orem is this: she is the real deal.  She's true blue, fiercely loyal as a friend, and as a poet, her poems reach out and grab absolute fistfuls of your heart and won't easily or ever let go of them. This poem, in particular, has a quiet and marauding quality about it.  It's angry, it's direct, and it's also a precise artistic expression of heartbreak in sixteen compact lines: oh, heretical grief / poetry will live forever / in the face of absence. The tension that this poem builds (and then resolves so frankly, so bleakly in its final couplet) is undeniable and difficult to watch as it unfolds.  As an artist myself, it's often been my tendency to take my sadnesses and devastations as they come and, when the moment of ruin passes, to tally my losses and chalk whatever's left up to poetic fodder.  I'm sure many of you do this as well.  This astute and rending poem is a reminder to us that art, while a lot, simply isn't all.  We must know when to say fuck the poems.  We must know when to beg a body back to life. To beg it back to love.

Thanks, Laura.

***

Ars Poetica

They say, we say, poetry

will live forever

but I say,

fuck the poems

art means nothing

in the face of absence

grief is heretical

fuck the poems

I say, art means nothing

in the face of absence

oh, heretical grief

poetry will live forever

in the face of absence

art means nothing

fuck the poems

come back

***

About the Poet:

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As anyone can see from the picture posted above, and the poems posted below, Jason Bredle is kind of awesome.  He's as fun in a face-to-face encounter as he is serious on the page, even (especially?) when he's being sly.  The Nepotist is especially fond of contradictions like that, as you, by now, well know.  I admire the smartness of Mr. Bredle's poems, their deft distillation of experience into words that are equally experiential, how they are at once funny and entirely sober ("Last year I performed an experiment to learn the effect of every imaginable substance upon my testicles. There are so many things that make me empty.").  To paraphrase and re-appropriate a line from Mr. Bredle himself, everything in and around these poems is music.  

Thanks, Jason.

***

JOFER RANCH

One thing I miss is the spectacle of 7:30. I like riding in the taxi with you because of the way your bare arm brushes against my bare arm. Do you feel the same about me? Tell me what you think of the bananas and cream. Here’s something controversial: I pose for a photograph in front of a statue of a horse with a huge erection. Is innocence only a product of my imagination? I’ve learned that a certain combination of sunlight and wind will cause a person to fall asleep driving. When I wake terrified in the middle of the night, you touch the back of my neck and it goes away. The mere presence of a swimming pool amazes me. It’s one of those days you want to take a neighbor’s cat under your arm and climb to the top of a mountain shaped like Jesus. For once I feel as if I have no burdens. What I fail to realize is that you do. Someday you’ll throw away all your photographs and forget me. Red next to yellow and you’re fucked. Few people have the magic to make everything they say coherently.

***

THE FINAL FANTASY

Something I like to do when walking in the rain with friends is yell acid rain and run a few paces ahead of everyone as if my skin is burning. It always gets a solid laugh. In another language my name means "the one with the answers to everything." I'm transitioning away from a lot of things at the moment: human interaction, sanity.  One in five will experience it. There's always the chitter-chatter of a nearby squirrel to wield the shank of antagonism into the stomach of defeat. I've had a lot of fun but can't do it anymore. I'm going to shower, take a scented bath, and shower again. I've never walked in the rain with anyone. The only question I want answered before I die is the only question that'll never be answered. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow is crazy sock day. Tomorrow I'm going to get the squirrel.

***

MOURNING VOICE

Last year I performed an experiment to learn the effect of every imaginable substance on my testicles. There are so many things that make me empty. I've spent so much energy dreaming of someplace else that I'm not even sure where I am anymore. It's like trying to make medicine fun. Real suffering isn't physical suffering but suffering that follows you your entire life. Take the circle, for instance. One day you're at the place and the next day you're not and the next day you've forgotten you'd ever been there. But how did we end up there? How did we take care of that sad, sad night? Everything around us was music. Tiny chandeliers fell from the sky. I'll always remember your shirt as we stood overlooking the bauxite mine, how it drew me into a fantasy, punished me, and then quietly pushed me away.

***

About the Poet:

Jason Bredle is the author of three books and three chapbooks, most recently Smiles of the Unstoppable and The Book of Evil.  He lives in Chicago.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

I'm curious about the editor's identity, but ultimately, does it really matter? I'm just happy to have been included.

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“The world was strep throat raw,” Larina Warnock writes in “Young Love for all the Wrong Reasons.” And it's a stunner of a line: deliberate, gritty, red and raging as the image it invokes.  But the poem itself unfolds sweetly, kindly, and so very sadly.  And this is what I like about Larina's work, how she's able to couple such dissonance.  She does it also (and perhaps more guttingly even) in the poem "Where the Truth Hides": At nine or ten, especially when absence / permeates every hello, you aren't quite old enough / to know that secrets half a mile wide twist / around and behind the eyes of everyone / who loves you... A truth like that, hide though it may try to, will out itself whether you are nine or ten or thirty-nine or forty. The Nepotist gets it.  The Nepotist knows you will too. 

The poet's own misgivings about her final poem aside (see below), it's The Nepotist's greatest pleasure to publish the whimsical work of his friends.  In fact, in the original call for submissions he specifically requested poems that the poets loved but could find no other home for.  The Nepotist only hoped he would receive such a fun and gallivanting romp through Storyland such as this one. Nota bene: I don't think the poem is ultimately as light as it appears to, on first read, be.  There's a darkness surging underneath the dis-tressing, and I'm not just speaking of 'Punzel's red-brown roots. 

Thanks, Larina.

***

Where the Truth Hides

I spent that week outside of Wenatchee

with Grandma and Grandpa and you.

Was I nine or ten?  The photograph shows

that was when I still wore my hair in braids.

Short bangs.  No ribbons.  You were picking

apples that year—God knows why—and your

folks brought me along on vacation so you'd have

visitation time.  Not much could surprise me

by that point in my life:  Not the current of the Columbia.

Not the ridges around Rock Island Dam.  But the man

I referred to as "my real dad" always rose above

expectation in those days, showed me new ways

to see and to be.  There wasn't a dream

you didn't reach out to seize and I 

believed you were more than a man back then.

At nine or ten, especially when absence

permeates every hello, you aren't quite old enough

to know that secrets half a mile wide twist 

around and behind the eyes of everyone

who loves you, that heroes are held to the earth

by lies hard as roots in basalt.

from Guitar Without Strings, scheduled for publication by The Lives You Touch Publications (http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com) in Fall 2010.

***

Young Love for All the Wrong Reasons

The world was strep throat raw

and east-beating concrete reflected

Chloraseptic heat.  At that age, poverty waits

like an infection in the pus-filled pockets

of the city, and one thinks they could scratch

their way through if the skin were just inside-out.

Untreated, what begins as beneficial fever

transforms into swarms of rheumatic intention.

No cardiologic cure for chambered spasms

or skipped beats, for errors so purposefully made.

This is why I still look back and praise the decision

to walk away.  Antibiotic dreams of letting go.

***

Rapunzel’s Distress

A diligent prince with a rescue in mind

approached a dark tower (once upon a time)

and knowing the name of the captive above,

he ah hmm’d and ah hemm’d ‘til his throat cleared enough,

called, “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your blond hair!”

and I, from my perch, sang, “It’s not blond down there.”

The Prince didn’t heed that short warning I gave,

but increased his desire for that pretty girl to save,

and since she had not responded to his first valiant try,

he ah hmm’d and ah hemm’d again, wiped sweat beads from his eye

called, “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your blond hair!”

And I, from my perch, sang, “It’s not blond down there.”

Rapunzel dropped her braid, though she feared the Prince would see

the telling red-brown roots that had said it all to me.

The Prince began to climb the wall while clinging to her braid,

but noticed on his upward path that darker strands were splayed,

called, “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! What’s wrong with your hair?”

And I, from my perch, sang, “It’s not blond down there.”

Rapunzel stuttered, sputtered, “I thought it more attractive,”

but the Prince replied most angrily, “Dyed hair implies you’re active,”

and with that he leapt back to the ground and saddled up his horse

just as the wicked witch came ‘round (Rapunzel’s step mama, of course).

She called out to that valiant prince, “But don’t you love her hair?”

And I, from my perch, sang, “It’s not blond down there.”

The moral of this story, though it may seem somewhat small

is if you’re gonna dye a little, then ya better dye it all.

***

About the Poet:

Larina Warnock works for Willamette Neighborhood Housing Services (http://www.w-nhs.org) in Corvallis, Oregon where she lives with her husband and four children.  Her poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in The Oregonian, Space & Time Magazine, Poet's Market 2011, Today's Caregiver, Wheelhouse Magazine, and others.  Her chapbook, "Guitar Without Strings" is forthcoming from the Lives You Touch Publications.  Larina is a student at Saint Xavier University and serves as the volunteer site administrator for the Academy of American Poets' online discussion forum (http://www.poets.org/forum), editor of The Externalist (http://www.theexternalist.com), and president of Writers on the River.  She is a graduate of Partners in Policymaking and is scheduled to graduate from the Leadership Corvallis program in June 2010.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

It's easier to tell who the editor isn't than who it is.  For example, neither OPW Fredericks nor Christine Klocek-Lim have time for another lit rag.  Colin Ward would never put out a call for submissions and tell people to send whatever they want.  The grammar of the call for submissions is too good to be a non-writer, but too honest to be a famous poet. In the end, the opportunity to have someone publish something whimsical (and probably crappy) as 'Rapunzel's Distress' makes the identity of the editor, well, irrelevant.

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