Elizabeth Clark Wessel, None of It Belongs to Me

 

Pioneer Women

My great-great grandmother Theresa
homesteaded her own acres
after her husband died of a headache.
She sent her children away until
they were old enough to drive a plow.
She was a Christian woman and canny—
the other pioneer women sent for her
when their times were near.
Pioneer women had many babies,
and many babies died. They had hearts
to break. Once I stood on a hill
surrounded by the graves of pioneer women
and their children, throwing handfuls
of my grandmother’s ash into a wind
that is always present; on every side
and below me ran straight lines of crops
in need of more water than the sky can give.
The crops are wrong for the land,
which prefers the ancient grasses.
In the lean years—or so the story goes—
pioneer women ground up grasshoppers
to make their bread.
They had meanness to drive them on.
They could give up almost anything
so they did. They were offered land
if they could keep it, and when they got it,
they put up fences. They must have known
their presence was a fence. While all around them
the dirty work of killing to keep the land went on.

It was through a chapbook produced in 2018 by Daniel Handler’s Per Diem Press [see my review of such here] that I first had the opportunity to explore the work of American-in-Sweden writer, editor, translator and publisher Elizabeth Clark Wessel, so I am very pleased for this further opportunity, through the publication of her full-length debut, None of It Belongs to Me (Boston MA: Game Over Books, 2024). She even has a birthday roundabout now, if the ending of her poem “Mary Wollstonecraft” is to be taken at face value (which could be considered speculative on my part, admittedly): “Today is my birthday / It’s cold and not yet spring / The minutes tick by relentlessly / We can never know where / we’re on our way to / and I will never be content / with this box of words / But I would like to leave it now / teetering at the edge / without tipping over [.]”

I appreciate the clarity of her lines, a lyric that plays with the accumulation of straight phrases and its variations, such as the poem “The Ersatz Viking Ship,” that begins: “I wake up. / I drink coffee. / I take the words of one language. / I put them into another language. / My goal is to keep the meaning. / What I think the meaning is.” There is a practicality to the narrative voice she presents, a pragmatism to these lyric threads: aware of what terrible things might occur but refusing to be overcome by them, simply allowing for what can’t be changed, and sidestepping what can easily be avoided. “my advice to you is / always the same,” she writes, as part of “My Advice,” “check the lock by picking it / leave the scabs on as long as you can stand / avoid whatever you feel / like avoiding for as / long as that’s a workable strategy [.]” There is an optimism that comes through as sheer perseverance and persistence, able to continue through, because of and no matter what. “After giving birth it starts to hurt.” she writes, to open the poem “Love Poem at Thirty-Seven,” “And then there’s no drive left. / Like a spent animal who has outrun / her predator. No energy to / seek it out. The flesh, the breath, / the deflated balloon of skin, the marks.” Wessel offers directions through her accumulation that appear, at first, straightforward enough, instead providing a sequence of turns, sweeps, bends and even twists across the lumps and bumps of her narratives. I would love to hear these poems read aloud, honestly. And the straightforwardness of her lines offer a mutability that can play with expectation, always providing a safe hand to hold through even the darkest places. As the poem “Sticks” ends: “It crashed onto us, crushing what wouldn’t be penetrated. / What I mean to say is the world kept ending, and we kept on / loving each other anyway. Isn’t that dumb. Isn’t that just / the dumbest thing you ever heard.”