Danielle Pafunda, Along the Road Everyone Must Travel

 

I walked the road seaward for the feast. I took my gold cuffs that keep my voice down, I combed the poison out of my lashes, I lashed to my breast a plate for knitted hours so that I might not / forget the way home, my keep, I keep / my daughter there, but it isn’t / home, I sing the easy tide of doing and weaving, but it isn’t / home, I try to leave it sincere in the knowledge of its anchor, in contrast with the sand, in agreement to stay put under juniper, and juniper, and, then I / send a couple texts to boost my spirits, fuck me, love me, kmn, and then I’m so deep in the road, fellow travelers mistake me for one of its / pebbles / I’m looking for tender / for my tender friends who will recognize me in the concrete ecotone, my bravado welling as Orion’s terse face sinks behind smog, Artemis prowling elsewhere, the god of the sea sucking a shipwreck, don’t / don’t tell me it gets nicer when it’s already nicer than I’d imagined, don’t

or (“Fast by the wide and dismal gates of hell I slowmo consider my claws / frontgold base done jammed with vernal strife even the equinox uneasy for / diggers”)

I’ve been hearing about American writer Danielle Pafunda some time now, only now beginning to attend their work, although she’s some ten published books of poetry and prose deep, the latest being Along the Road Everyone Must Travel (Broomall PA: Saturnalia Books, 2025). The poems that make up this collection are propulsive, explosive, almost excessive; a rush of lyric, with each line and poem expanding almost exponentially. Her titles, even by themselves, offer a deliberate rush of text at breakneck speed, short poems in and of themselves, offering a table contents not simply as a list of titles, but a hint of what is to come: “You go back to get your holy things when your skin has greater part sun than air and stop touching your bitter friends it’s all true once married I had to go to the underworld for a really long time after which I came to live above the biotoxic soil crust but not with you or anyone” to “I turned thirty in wartime I turned forty in wartime stay you irritate my heart with distance until the present comes a sheet of pearls and moor’s breath in a dry clime and I bedeck you” to “I ducked into a sympathetic Pleiades and before I knew it neither desert nor sea stopped where the mountains started [.]” Hers is a lyric akin to prayer, writing of resistance and resilience in and around and through threads of Greek mythology, of gods and daughters and escaping from and to the underworld, offering shades of Demeter; of either/ors, clipped speech and poem-endings, which suggest a kind of ongoingness throughout the collection, akin to a long poem, set as a single, ongoing, staggered sentence.

I fish around for the salt god’s number and involve him in a bath of electrolyte tears / fuck me, I beg / fuck my life / take the bare spot on a bird’s chest and liken it to my losses easily foretold, easy in the hand, so hard to slip the scalpel to / whoever was in there, who left her familiar lashed to the bed, wasn’t me, wasn’t my daughter, I / tell my daughter don’t start crying or you’ll / never stop crying / don’t give your number out to gods, and when you go back to hades, go quiet and lone / sometimes / I’m on the road deep in the desert where sunlight breaches my breastbone, the only protection I took, I wasn’t thinking clearly when I packed my bag, I packed things I didn’t / need / don’t fit in with the salt god’s retinue of beautiful people

or (“I fall asleep waiting for a call from the tribunal waiting for the elders to get here with their sacrificial blade I fall asleep before I die I want more dreams”)

There is an absolute heft packed into the small space of this sharp and stunning collection, approaching the narrative of her lyric moment by small moment, building upon and stretching outward, each stanza set as a dot on a long horizon.