Paul Cunningham, Fall Garment

 

into magma town i go, a history of fires,
sun-slashed and stranded in high school

it’s amazing how a field can bend

      an already drifting body 

the tendrest branch
of the coldest wrist

how the Ohio River disappears queers,
heavy hangs a school sweater

a fringe of palm, a surf-flinked body,
my friend leaves a bar at 2am alone

and i text them until
i know they’re home

i think about yearbooks, exit ramps, spirals
an all-American body’s innocent smile

            something
            not even most
            mothers
            can love

somehow i was always outside
the principal’s office laughing

somehow i always fell
for a hometown mirage

Georgia poet, editor, translator and publisher Paul Cunningham’s second full-length collection is Fall Garment (London UK: Schism Press, 2022), following a handful of chapbooks and the full-length debut, The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). Set in three sections—“BOOK I : FACTORY APPETITE,” “BOOK II : SIC ARC” and “BOOK III : FALL GARMENT”—Cunningham’s accumulated triptych of suites together forms a larger lyric around work and industry, geography and gender, sexuality and fashion, elements of which are reminiscent of work by such as Philadelphia poet Ryan Eckes’ ongoing engagement with labour and the short lyric accumulation, or even other explorations around history, labour and specific neighbourhoods, including Brooklyn poet Susan Landers writing Philadephia’s Germantown through Franklinstein (New York NY: Roof Books, 2016) [see my review of such here] or Brooklyn writer and performer Anna Vitale’s Detroit Detroit (Roof Books, 2017) [see my review of such here]. Writing a “linguistic decadence” and long stretches of accumulating lyric poem-sections, Cunningham opens with the factory, connecting clothing as a thread that runs through labour to fashion to queer culture. He writes of factory-spaces converted to bathhouses, the AIDS crisis and an erasure of text and trauma, culture and human lives, pushed aside for the sake of comfort and commodity. As Lindsay Tigue offers as part of her 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize Judge’s Comments: “Paul Cunningham’s “Factory Appetite’ considers the deep history of a place—a part of Pennsylvania where the Anchor Hocking/Phoenix Glass plant is located. The poem includes references to the layered history of naming, of disaster, of environmental impact, and what it is like to be another product of a town that’s become indistinguishable from its industry.”

when you make garments

so perfectly 

there has to be something

that renders them 

a little imperfect

the populous 

their urns

stood in resistance

endeavoured to burn

many coins buried them

underground

iron rings and iron

Caesars

of bulk and bigness

the urns deposited nothing

only more uncertainty

these parts

garrisoned

planted before

the dates of their instruments