Stephanie Cawley, No More Flowers

 

Doing the crossword every day is useless but I finish it anyway.
The government is useless but it intercedes daily.
In the mail I receive a handwritten letter from a neighbor
urging me to find hope for the future. God knows our thoughts, she says.
On Fridays I deliver bags of groceries to old women who live alone.
One woman drinks Colt 45s and fills her apartment with smoke.
The anarchists have a good system for disposing of moldy tomatoes
and sorting bags of vegan snacks lifted from Whole Foods.
I rearrange my life for mostly nothing, which will probably kill me. (“Okay”)

I’m intrigued by Philadelphia poet Stephanie Cawley’s latest full-length poetry collection, No More Flowers (Raleigh NC: Birds/LLC: 2024), a collection that follows My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here], a manuscript chosen by Solmaz Sharif as winner of the Slope Book Prize. No More Flowers is constructed through three untitled clusters of poems, bookended by the three-page extended poem, “Loom,” and nine-page extended poem, “To the Lighthouse.” “The machine weaves cloth / so a woman can write / a poem.” begins the opening poem, “Loom,” “The machine weaves / so one woman can write / while another woman // wipes the first woman’s / baby’s bottom.” There’s an emotional rawness to these poems, one that overlays a craft that displays a lyric comfort, and an ease, as the poems in No More Flowers write of resistance, endurance, survival and simply making it through.

“I didn’t want to write anymore about fucking.” the poem ““Normal Life”” begins, “Someone died. Someone was always / dying. I was writing about fucking probably right when somebody died. Ground / down to paste, my tooth grinds. I finally broke into the prison, the poet’s last tweet / before she dies. I slide into the tub, salt the water so I am a chicken in broth. My sad, / little heart, I think.” I like the way Cawley layers a Leonard Cohen quote over thoughts of sex and death, rippling echoes across a prose poem held by lyric bond. There’s an urgency across Cawley’s lyrics simply for the absence of it, writing an exhaustion and a grief that permeates every poem, every line. The poems are constructed across an attempt to articulate and construct a life, blending intimacy with public declarations, realizing the only way inside might be all the way through. Or, as the expansive prose accumulation “The Completeness of the World is in / Danger if I Die” offers:

I feared the transparency afforded by narrative, having to settle on an ending.
Many things happened on the way. A detail of sunlight peering through thick
branches to touch a patch of moss foreclosed all forward motion.

We take turns searching for a picture of an adequately somber bird. I tune out
while the poet I don’t like speaks about darkness and lightness with great sincerity.

There was an idea of what a poet was, and then there was Mary Shelley carrying a
box containing her dead husband’s heart everywhere she went.

Two ruined things, an object, and its study. a dedication to one’s ugliest forms.
One could be mean and beautiful and the two qualities began to seem contingent.