Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Shopping, or The End of Time

 

80 to 90 percent of my awareness
Is a delicate ear turned gently toward my son

Which means I ignore
What would have previously torn me asunder

You may imagine motherhood as a funnel of sand
Into which one is pulled

You may imagine a wrecked ship pulling the inhabitants down with her
Into the water

Except for this metaphor
You are willingly rinsing yourself in sand or heavy water

It is an ecstasy of familial love
Among the sand and water (“80 TO 90 PERCENT OF MY AWARENESS”)

The latest from poet Emily Bludworth de Barrios is the poetry collection Shopping, or The End of Time (Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), a collection that works through the lyric of narrative monologue to examine personal space and interpersonal being, including new motherhood and ongoing parenting, as well as simply living as a human being in the world, with all the messy nonsense and possible beauty that goes along with existence. “With pleasure the young men,” she writes, to open the poem “WITH PLEASURE THE YOUNG MEN,” “dismantle the young women // With pleasure their sick slick grins drip over the wet idea // of humiliated flesh [.]” Raised in Houston, Cairo and Caracas and currently based in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Bludworth de Barrios is the author of the full-length debut Splendor (H_NGM_N Books, 2015), as well as the chapbooks Extraordinary Power (Factory Hollow Press, 2014) and Women, Money, Children, Ghosts (Sixth Finch, 2016). Shopping, or The End of Time, her second full-length collection, is set, within an opening as well as closing poem, into four sections of narrative lyrics—“WOMEN,” “MONEY,” “CHILDREN” and “GHOSTS”—all of which are individually constructed as assemblages of short phrases and bursts; her narratives are less built as accumulations than as a cadence of narrative waves, rolling through rise and fall to either a final crescent, or a sweep up to the shore of the space beyond that final word.

My new blue kitchen cabinets painted blue
Black countertops, black granite flecked with dirty starlight
And Saltillo tile from Saltillo, Mexico, baked, glazed earth and still some little
imprints from the foot of a dog who passed probably 50 years ago
When the Earth had fewer dogs probably but more species, fewer people, but
more thick forest, more dark trees and the webs strung between the trees,
clumps of sticks pushed into nests with the vulnerable blue, white, or cream
eggs inside, speckled, warm, the squirrels’ nests that contain two entrances
that are also two exists, a burrow in the sky, warm and dry
A bird singing with its narrow throat, its voice a slender stem
The legs of the insects slander as stems
The stems numerous and dense moving in quick ticks
My thoughts numerous and dense
Thickly sprouting, dumb (“MY NEW BLUE KITCHEN CABINETS PAINTED BLUE”)

Throughout her poems, Bludworth de Barrios seems fond of the direct statement, whether set as a point from which her narrative can expand further, a counterpoint or even a side-step, depending, of course, on where the statement is set in those narrative waves of rise and fall, rise and fall. “To be a mother,” she writes, as part of the two-page poem “80 TO 90 PERCENT OF MY AWARENESS,” “Is to be a figure in a painting // Wrapped in a sacred blanket [.]” Later on in the collection, the poem “STATUES OR KNOTTED ROPES OR SCORED STONE” offers a slight variation, or even a continuation: “A person is a device / For storing information across time // The parent melts or dissolves / And up springs the child // A person // Is a phenomenal device / That assembles itself from dirt and air [.]”

In certain ways, this is very much a collection writing and exploring the trauma and beauty both large scale and small of parenting, children and interacting with and through the culture, the present, each other and the universe. It would be interesting to examine the ways through which her direct statements on self and being connect, and even conflict, to each other; evolving in the normal ways of human complication: we are never simply one thing, in one way or direction; often working multiple simultaneously. Note the poem, for example, “MY PREGNANCY WAS A LONG AND HAPPY NIGHTMARE,” a three-page extended lyric that opens: “My pregnancy / Was a long and happy nightmare // During which I ate / Pint-sized tubs of ice cream and walked around the block // Becoming more tubby and unwieldly / As if living in the skin of a drum // Wielding and propelling my belly / Feeling dreamy and druggy in the suburbs under the sun [.]” There is a swell and swoop of her narrative, but also a subtle music across that same lyric that itself fills and diminishes across such a lovely spectrum of her lines. One is nearly required to close one’s eyes to truly listen.