lukas ray hall, loudest when startled

 

HOW TO BELONG

when i drag home,
at five in the morning

carcass & split hooves
when i show them

where the heart splayed
from its overwork

when i show them
how the antlers held

at the right angle
cradle the sun

with their velvet
when i show them

how i return
from the night’s rain

with hands
like nature, all burr

& bruise, all mud
& pale, & bring them

this heirloom,
this slain invader,

they will call me by
your surname

& embrace me
around the wood fire,

brother, as though
i were you.

American poet lukas ray hall’s full-length debut is loudest when startled (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2021), a suite of deeply personal poems composed as long, narrative threads and accumulative stretches, writing thought upon thought, phrase against phrase. loudest when startled writes on and around the American fascination with guns, with gun violence, and the attempts at connection to a brother who owns guns, as a shared kind of intimacy; as a means through which to reach their brother. “after the bullet escapes / the barrel,” hall writes, to open the poem “THE WAY IT DIES,” “after it snaps open throat / then lung, // makes blood & tissue / its new family, // my brother & i wade through / the ironwoods // to find it.” hall writes an attempt at closeness to a brother despite his view that sees guns as a solution that ignores and absolves all else, examining how deeply ingrained, for some, gun culture has become. In the poem “ON YOUR SUGGESTION, I BOUGHT A HANDGUN,” hall’s narrator writes of speaking to this same sibling about “my mental issues, / & somehow // that conversation ended / with you telling me // to buy a handgun. / because then // i’d feel safer, / i’d feel more protected, // more in control.” Speaking in the same poem of attempts at suicide, there is still the presuming that, despite depression or mental health concerns, purchasing and owning a gun is somehow the preferred, if not only, solution. hall’s poems are unsettling, in part, for simply how familiar some of this kind of thinking is, how just about everyone knows someone that thinks this way, even as further shootings are evidenced across the United States.

i stare at the computer screen.
a news feed pulls right.

the name of a town.
some town

i’ve never heard of
will become commonplace

on my tongue tomorrow &
the day after.

a reporter, hair tight
& neat, stands

on the curbside
in front of a school.

her hands a bit shaky
holding the microphone. (“NEWS”)

There are obviously connections one can make to another spring 2021 debut by an American poet, Anna Leigh Knowles, who wrote about gun culture and gun violence specifically around the high school shooting at Columbine High School in her Conditions of the Wounded (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. The two collections might be, in their own way, sibling collections, although hall’s explorations aren’t so specific as Knowles’, writing instead of the unsettling aspect of a sibling relationship, performative maleness and gendered roles around larger and more pervasive gun culture. As well, hall writes a claustrophobic feeling and ongoing anxiety around self and queer identity, issues of masculinity and guns, referencing hunting and other kinds of violence. “the claustrophobic feeling,” hall writes, as part of the poem “OBSESSION,” “of being yourself // in your own body. / getting in a car, // passing someone, / cutting them off. // the buck all tangled / on the side of the road.” There is an intriguing compactness to the long threads of hall’s lyrics, accumulating phrase upon phrase stepping one foot ahead of another down the length of the page, rhythmically staccatoed as a kind of broken/unbroken line. The patters and patterns allow for an intriguing unfurling of his meditations, forcing both a slowness and a quick pace that will be intriguing to see develop. “my nervous lip,” hall writes, to end the poem “PROTECTION,” “its twitch // left hand how fidgeting / in my coat pocket. // bottom to top / he examined my sheltered // my alien / my foolish body.”