Erika Meitner, Useful Junk

 

we used to go to the Bulgarian Bar but not together

                                    (for D.)

the place on Broadway & Canal whose motto
was helping ugly people have sex since 416 BC and
it probably had another name but everyone
only knew it as the Bulgarian Bar where
Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz
who was very sexy in that sweaty limber way like
Mick Jagger but much skeezier & with a thick
Ukrainian accent DJ’ed Gypsy music & we
figured this out somehow while reminiscing
about our 20s in NYC via text & our 20s
in the city were PowerPoint temp jobs were
stealing rolls of toilet paper from restaurant
bathrooms were pagers & flip phones & pay
phones were July subway platform infernos
were whiffs of hot copper & pee & trash
were walkup cockroaches were dive bar
makeout sessions were chain-smoking on
fire escapes & unspecified parades rolling
past tall office windows were brick façade
or window casements falling to the sidewalk
& shattering at our feet were illegal sublets
& late rent checks & spit-shined heartbreak
when nothing & nobody depended on us &
she said, Did I tell you I head-butted a girl
in the face there one night dancing?
Not on purpose but still …

The author of six full-length poetry collection, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), Copia (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2014) and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018) [see my review of such here], the latest from Virginia poet Erika Meitner is Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Useful Junk is an assemblage of narrative stretches and storytelling lyrics of nuance, wit and considered space. Meitner composes evocative landscapes of broad strokes and fine detail, whether writing on nostalgia, sex, lost friends, ex-lovers and illicit cigarettes, and there is a rush to her lines that occasionally leaves one breathless. “I want to tell you about the crampon guy you’d laugh so hard,” she writes, as part of the poem “Elegy with Lo-Fi Selfie,” “because / in college remember New Hampshire winters some days our scarves // welded to our lips froze to our cheeks with just an inhale’s vapor / your breath your breath is gone & now I want to take a picture // of my ass to send to you because I think you’d think it was hilarious / or sexy or possibly both [.]” She writes of moments fleeting and long past, and how to hold on best to those as they occur, as she offers as part of the poem “I would like to be the you in someone’s poem”:

They say put me in your fictional poem because we are all fictions, because the way the hot driveway feels on my bare feet when I go get the mail at 5 p.m. is not real—not the walking or the heat stored up all day then emitted from cement or the paper in my hands addressed to me

Because the way I open the box twice to make sure I haven’t missed something exciting is also not real

Writing out repeated selfies (including at least one nude) and the occasional voyeurism, her poems are vast, contained and ambitious, composing lyric sentences that pull and push across the page in a deeply physical way. Hers are poems set in the body, writing out and through ways of depicting, seeing and self, as well as how we carry and broadcast ourselves. “Yves,” she writes, as part of the poem “Médium Adam 25,” “listen: we are making // art because we want to inhabit everything / and not fear it.” There is a way she writes seeing the self at a point where one begins to see and even fear change, aging away from reckless youth, and wishing to still appear vibrant, even dangerous, half-pleased to watch those naïve and self-destructive encounters fade into rear-view, and half-mourning the loss of those feelings of freedom; one can see the awareness of aging through these poems, with a slight glint of fear: of mortgages, divorced neighbours with teenaged children and in a knowledge that her younger self couldn’t have possibly known. “I don’t know / if there’s a god,” she writes, as part of the poem “A Temple of the Spirit,” “but sometimes we are asked / to carry a baton for long periods of time as if / we’re in a relay and can hand it off to the / next person waiting usually somewhere other / than the place we began, though that action is / so tricky and fails often.”

Or the end of the breathless prose-sentence of “from this thought a hazy question,” a kind of self-aware and sexy improvement on the mythologies of the American road trip, what Jack Kerouac couldn’t have yet begun to imagine, in a rush and a sweep akin to that final paragraph of On the Road, as Meitner’s poem concludes: “when I had my first cigarette since 2007 and it was better than / I remember anything being—an incandescent American Spirit I bummed / from my friend Wayne on a bar porch and there I was smoking in the / warm March evening while traffic shushed past on Main Street, the tip / lit like a taillight then vanished to ash like a car driving off in the dark / each time I inhaled and can I ask you again to tell me about my body, / to introduce me to my own luminous skin?” She writes of “useful junk,” but these are the details that become most important, the ones that provide the elements of a real life, truly told and truly lived; what might otherwise get tossed aside in the retellings. One might refer to these poems as ‘poems of hope and experience,’ as Meitner is clearly aware enough to know what might be lost, and might be gained, and what might need to be sacrificed for the sake of getting there; but yet, these poems are entirely propelled by a hope that she will eventually make it. As the poem “Swift Trucks” ends:

When the world spoke to you
it said stay. It said fragmentary.

It touched your face, your

beleaguered tender important face
and said this and this and this.

 

Erika Meitner, Holy Moly Carry Me

II. (WHO IS ON A JOURNEY TO A HOLY PLACE)

In the 16^th century, pilgrims on wanderings

were identified by fixed attributes:

the staff, the shoulder bag, the badges

on their broad-brimmed hats. I am not

a wanderer, but I ride on a lot of airplanes.

I do not usually recline my seat.

The aisle makes me feel less claustrophobic.

When I drive home from the airport

over the mountains in the evening there’s

fog again through headlights, more like gauze,

as if the entire town has been bandaged.

When I return home, I often think estuary

or why aren’t the curtains closed since

it’s night? When I return this time,

the pumpkins have collapsed in on themselves

on the porch and it’s raining. Like any

passing stranger, I can see clearly

into my own house. (“Peregrinus”)

Virginia poet Erika Meitner’s fifth full-length poetry collection—after Inventory at the All-night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003), idEAL CiTiES (HarperPerennial, 2010), Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011) and Copia (BOA Editions, 2014)—is Holy Moly Carry Me (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2018), a book that opens with a curious and meditative poetic prose-exploration of “Holy Moly” that includes “There are things I will never know. There are stories that are past telling. // no matter how much testimony we gather. No matter how many details we proclaim.” As her prose-exploration begins:

In The Odyssey there’s mention of a plant called moly, which is sacred and harvested only by the gods.

The gods are vengeful but they are also good to us, though we have given up sacrifices and burnt offerings.

With regard to burnt offerings, the following is a concise statement of the Levitical law: these were wholly animal, and the victims were wholly consumed.

The Animal Gang was a marauding group of hooligans who used potatoes studded with razor blades during pitched battles on the streets of Dublin in the 1930s.

Which is to say that the moley was an ordinary potato, its surface jagged with metal edges.

“Holy moley!” was Captain Marvel’s characteristic exclamation of surprise.

Because the oath might have been offensive to some, “Holy Moly” was used in the late 1920s as a jocular euphemism for “Holy Moses.”

Holy Moses is also a German thrash metal band, known for its lead singer Sabina Classen—one of the first and only women to use a death growl.

Moses demanded the release of the Israelites from slavery, and led them out of Egypt and across the Red Sea. After 40 years of wandering in the desert, he died within sight of the promised land.

In A Dictionary of the Underworld, ‘moley’ is preceeded by ‘mokker’—Yiddish for maker. (“HolyMolyLand”)

The poems in Holy Moly Carry Me are a combination of commentary and exaltation, critique and joyous celebration. As the back cover informs, her poems “take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia […],” and work through strains of deeply-set racism, small town diners, neighbours, children, religion and gun violence. Rich and vibrant, her poems revel in heart and impulse, and there is no detail too small to slip past her attention, such as the travel-notes of “On the Road,” that opens: “We are trying to get pregnant / so everything makes me weep:[.]” Her poems are long, lyric, and expansive, composed as declarations and field notes, reportage and deeply held beliefs. Her poems are heartfelt, broken and ragged, seeking redemption and even salvation (or at least a salve) where none might be possible; writing narrative stretches that attempt both understanding and redemption across the dark shades of the American canvas of gun violence, as she writes in the poem “Our Holiday Letter”: “Dear / friends. This year / has dragged like / a broken tailpipe, // all scrapes and sparks, / but I’m telling you, / though we’ve been // tested and tested, / most days, we still / feel blessed, and // wish you peace / in spite of our / hardships, and // maybe joy, / though yesterday / twenty children // were gunned down / in an elementary / school, and is there // anyone who isn’t / thinking about / every same weekday // morning—we wave / to the dark squares / of yellow bus windows // our only child rides / to a place where they / sing songs he’s never // heard.”