You Look
Like I Feel
Dirt on my chin and I wonder: Am I already
in the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot
shed
the sense that I have died. The German word
for heaven’s the same
as the German word for sky. On hearing a cruel
prince was in danger, I prayed for him to
thrive,
not for his own sake, but for the concubines,
sure to end up buried
along. To my real face, a man once crowed
I RUINED YOU, and though he did, the joke’s
on him: he ruined me only for this world,
and this world is not long
for itself. The earth, that ever-loving
but distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a
little
pocket money when it dies, never the land—
I’m
quite struck by many of the poems in Somerville, Massachusetts poet Natalie Shapero’s latest poetry title, Hard Child (Port Townsend
WA: Copper Canyon Pres, 2017), a follow-up to her first collection, No Object (Saturnalia, 2013). Predominantly
composed as a collection of short, first-person lyrics, there is a performative
element to Shapero’s poems, composed as a combination of lyric essay and
monologue, each of which are delivered with force, whether a push or a punch. As
she writes to open the poem “Mostly I Don’t Want to Have a Son—”: “too many
fears. What if he knows the ancients / believed more boys than girls were born
in wartime, / to account for casualties in battle, leave / the world in
balance?” Shapero’s poems speak of and through an enduring humanity, including
death, trauma, shootings, dying, New York in the 80s, religion and those
particularly dark days that infect so much else, such as the poem “Seven Wounds
in Two People,” that begins: “How Dallas, the name of Dallas, the whole / of
Dallas seemed to be tainted after the shooting. // WHAT A BLACK EYE FOR THE
CITY, NO ONE / WILL GO THERE.” And yet, it is through that lens of humanity
that this wouldn’t be classified as a collection of dark poems, but poems
attempting to wade forward, through that dark into the other side, while even
acknowledging that the fabled other side might not exist.
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