francine j. harris, Here is the Sweet Hand

 

The joke is orange. Which has never been funny.
For a while, I didn’t sleep on my bright side.
Many airplanes make it through sky.
The joke is present: dented and devil.
For a while, yellow spots on the wall.
Obama on water skis, the hair in his armpits, free.
I thought the CIA was operative.
Across the alley, a woman named Mildred.
Above the clouds in a plane, a waistline of sliced white.
I don’t sound like TED Talk, or smart prose on Facebook.
These clouds are not God.
I keep thinking about Coltrane; how little he talked.
This is so little, I give so little. (“Single Lines Looking Forward / or One Monostich Past 45”)

I’d been eager to go through a copy of Houston, Texas poet francine j. harris’ third full-length collection, Here is the Sweet Hand (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), given how struck I was by play dead (Farmington ME: Alice James Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], a follow-up to her debut, allegiance (Detroit MI: Wayne State University Press, 2012). harris has a way of seeing and presenting the world through stunning lyrics, writing the personal and the political in equal weight; presenting the world in which she lives, moving simultaneously through political reportage, personal memoir and cultural observation. The poems that make up Here is the Sweet Hand appear to exist in that stretch of time beyond American President Barack Obama’s final term and into the stress and horror of the weeks and months that followed, although as part of her “Ten Questions” interview posted online at Poets & Writers on August 4, 2020, she specifies the timeline of the collection:

How long did it take you to write Here Is the Sweet Hand?

This is always a difficult question for me because I build manuscripts from poems that fit together. The oldest poem in Here Is the Sweet Hand is probably from 2007, but many of the poems that determine the mood of this book were written in the last two years. Also, several of the poems were written during my time in northern Michigan a few years ago that kind of set the stage for the collection.

harris is capable of remarkably powerful and evocative descriptions, sweeping across large distances in the stretch of mere sentences, as she writes as part of the poem “Reflections in a Pool of Hair,” “You wheeze / and the small gay men at the bar spend sunset / tuning American Idol onto two screens. // They talk like bar glass. In their gravel, they vote singers. // There is a tingle at the back of your throat that holds the phone on hold / and thinks the words // Obama.” Here Is the Sweet Hand is a book exploring division and crises; a book of conflict. “This // the living, barely breathing language. This / the language with no hope for a new organ.” She writes, as part of “Language over information…” “Now this / over here language could be saved, if only // we had enough oxygen. There is no oxygen. But here, / this language only needs a suture for its passive voice, / a simple interrupted stitch for its drone-on spiel. Language takes / information by its hair and rides it // nighttime.” harris writes of conflict seeking comprehension; how conflicts occur and how to solve them, although fighting her own share of occasional battles. Some battles require the fight. “For the absence of / language,” she writes, “there is more than one side.”

“I can’t / imagine you any thinner if it’s revolution // you want, I’m gunless like a thing with wings.” she writes, as part of the poem “Junebug.” harris captures a moment, and even a tone, of time in dense language, yet allowing an ease through which any reader might be offered and allowed in. “I caught my hair on fire in a fistfight. We had / decorative words.” she writes, to open the poem “Ask me now and I would say.” The flourish and relish of her language cascades, bounds and bounces, and clearly delights in a serious play, as harris clearly isn’t afraid of any blending of conversational and written language, interplaying the casualness and density of what is possible through one word simply following another. As she writes in “Ask me now and I would say,” further on:

Someone in those moments is sure to get scratched.

She grew out her nails for it.
I lit her up in the dark. In this retelling, we both spit out

hunks of each other on the bathroom lawn where raccoons ditch.
In this version, no one succumb. No freeze on a narrative

and all explain away bully by her dark-skinned cheek.
In this retelling, I get beneath her

in the greased grass. I watch the star
in her eye and we

roll over it. We unbridle that shit.

 

francine j. harris, play dead

first, take a fistful of hair

Listen first for anyone. Fill your pockets.

Measure the ditch with a wad of gum. Listen.

Stay still. Break open the gate with your fist.

a back seat to torch. ditch it. You will need

someone, still. Empty your pockets. Check for wild fur

and the pant. who wad seats. or possums who hiss

under wild shrub. Sharp shooters check the wind.

So measure your mouth. the curve of howl. drool

and its drop against the wooden tiles. Possum

under salt and pine. Screech it. Score the rope

with your teeth. Collect the drool in tin.

Check for rust. Pull out the nails. Wait

for the wood to sag of blood. to good and stalled.

Mount the mouth. slip down. Slide under

sludge, until the caves open and break. and

salt your wounds. and play the black cricket.

and nail on the stars. Run low to ground.

until your hairs unseat. and your cheek

full of shotgun howls. and sags. and

and touches its own blood to light.

Michigan poet francine j. harris’ second book is play dead (Farmington ME: Alice James Books, 2016), a rich and lively collection of poems that jump and tumble through syntax and language, writing poems on sex, community and violence with an abiding love, mediated breath and remarkable insight. The author of the collection allegiance (Detroit MI: Wayne State University Press, 2012), there are are overtones of dark histories in play dead, as she writes to open the poem “the cafeteria is also assembly”: “where the lit footage of lynched boys in verdant / trees fills a screen that snaps and rips[.]” In play dead, harris dismantles language and culture to rework the best and the worst of the world in which she lives into discrete poems, blended together to create and critique an incredible tapestry of hope, heart and hearth. Some poems, such as “in Lebanon, a girl who cries crystals,” are absolutely devastating, in part for their unflinching straightforwardness, challenging the ways in which we see (or even ignore) what is happening right in front of us: “Black birds thicket dead sky // and in an Austrian basement, a woman births her father’s children for years // which no one claims a miracle. A woman / in Oklahoma holds up a two-year-old baby girl // to keep her lover from being tasered, which is also not / an act of God.” harris’ poems both reveal and critique silences that require an intricate series of navigations to survive, and in a way that pokes, prods and alters the language. I am deeply impressed with this book, and how she manages to make the language far more dynamic than I’ve seen in some time. In a recent interview at divedapper, she speaks to her approach to language, writing:

You know it kind of reminds me of that Key & Peele skit, “Pussy on the Chainwax,” and you have no idea what that phrase means, right? And so they’re just shooting pool and Key uses this term, like, “Man, I put the pussy on the chainwax.” And there’re a few guys in the room who start laughing and repeating it. And Peele is like, “That’s not an expression. You trying to start a thing, aren’t you?” and the whole thing they’re playing on is the way that people try to insert their stamp on culture, and on how we speak, and try to make something—a thing.

To me that’s a really fascinating possibility with language. I think it’s kind of important, actually, that in that skit, Key kind of has an emotional breakdown about his daily struggles. Like to say ‘man can you just let me have this…this language.’ I guess I realized in the last several years that I’m not the kind of person who’s interested in preserving language. I love how it changes. I’m not afraid of textspeak, I’m not afraid of abbreviations. I think we just wind up doing more fun things with how language appears. Twerking! We’re twerking our language.