Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In

 

TIE

In the garden, privacy collides with wine and Scrabble as I contemplate the single, silicone dome they emptied on the belt at security. How to keep this in perspective, myself, inadmissible to that love or what happens on each side of the border? I find it absolutely intolerable to be made to leave the room. Sex and cat toys punctuate the open-concept honest of first nights at sea with the fluency of decoys that don’t get homesick. I got lonely, went to church, entered a concept hospital for only hair and nails. Zioskirche falls in and out of relation, but only as long as you think it: that this can and can’t go on forever, that you do and don’t want this to go on forever, that you are safe on planes, in a bathroom, captive, asleep, but that it is better to be out, beyond the idea of your secret interior. I squeezed my thighs tight so I wouldn’t fall off. Like most protests, the bruise will drain and then return to stasis. Your dreams turn sweet and then uncomfortably sour as sudden death drafts two teams of unequal need. You are slight and resonant. Your twin leaves the party before you can do the same. Come outside, bearing the shape of the house that you come from. Arrive at the diner, rarified by light-years of desire. Volumes of moss will roll out, red hot along the lava beside the road. Skies divide, the bed dissolves like Dippin’ Dots. There is a secret you don’t yet know how to confess. The game cannot end in a tie, but you are paralyzed by choice, and terrified by the loss of every side.

I’m quite taken with New York-based poet and postdoctoral fellow Wendy Lotterman’s full-length debut, A Reaction to Someone Coming In (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2023), following on the heels of her chapbook Intense Holiday (After Hours, 2016). The blurbs on the back cover offer descriptors such as “percussive” and “scorching,” and Lotterman’s poems and prose-lyrics offer a swagger and pulsating directness on degrees of family, intimacy, motherhood and sex, composing a layering of direct statements and lyrics that accumulate across and form into larger narrative structures. “Let us rob them.” the poem “PEARL” opens. “When this family / Is discovered to be the secret of that / Family, it is difficult to keep. Up in / The steam room, nursed by / Noise and heat, the faucet talks / Down tapestries of scenes telling / Something other than stories.”