November 6th, 2008
Glover Davis
Glover Davis is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at San Diego State University, where he taught for almost forty years. His books of poetry are Bandaging Bread, August Fires, Legend, and, most recently, Separate Lives, which appeared in 2007. He has published his work in many journals, including The Southern Review, Poetry, The New England Review, and The Journal. He did his undergraduate work at Fresno State and received an MFA from the University of Iowa. After his retirement from teaching, he returned to live in Fresno.
Crayon Drawings
When I was three my mother’s friends would make
me sing the songs that throbbed from their cloth-front
radios; songs like “Mairzie Doats” would stick
on my tongue when women laughed at every note.
Despite their gentleness and grace I felt
ridiculous and knew I’d never sing
like this again. I thought that all those lilt-
ed syllables I lost were like seeds flung
into a darkness where they’d land and root.
When the kindergarten teacher’s pencil rose
like a baton I made myself as mute
as a carved stone. When Mrs. Hester’s dress
flared like a cape as she showed us how to dance
I wouldn’t dance. When I was ten I’d take
a stinging slap from a nun who’d make me chant
the Latin phrases but I wouldn’t sing.
She didn’t know the seeds beyond a film
of tears would bud like poppies and the spilled
fumes wrinkle through the air from cup to cup.
She didn’t know that somewhere deep inside
bright notes were frothing toward my own cut lip,
the petals reddening every bitter ode
that hummed beneath my breath like swarming bees.
A poppy’s bloody mouth would drink the sun
in angry crayon drawings. But I’d grow
so quickly, soon there would be syllables
like plants white-waters root up and tear free.
They’d move up my throat, loose from my lips all
bleak songs a man would sing against the air.
Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, which won the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her newest collection, Red Sugar, appeared this year from University of Pittsburgh Press. She is a recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Beatty is the cohost and producer of Prosody, a weekly radio program featuring the work of nationally known writers. She teaches the Madwomen in the Arts Writing Workshop, and in the MFA program at Carlow University. She lives in Pittsburgh.
Red Sugar
You walk inside yourself on roads and ropes
of blood vessels and tendons, you walk inside
yourself and eat weather
—Gretel Ehrlich
When I was young, I was a comet
with an unending shimmering tail,
and I flew over the brokenness below
that was my life. I didn’t know until I was
twelve that we carry other bodies inside us.
Not babies, but bodies of blood
that speak to us in plutonic languages
of pith and serum. When I was
six, there was a man in the woods,
naked. I didn’t know him, but I knew
he was a wrong kind of man/so I ran.
With my inside body I see his skinny
white bones and curled mouth, he looks
like sickness and it’s the body inside me
that’s running, my red sugar body
that shows me the brutal road to love,
the one good man, the one song
I can keep as mine. I heard it once
when I was waitressing, something
made me turn my head, made me
swivel to look at a woman across
the room, wasn’t even my station,
but the red sugar said, go. When I
saw her up close, I knew she was
blood. I can’t explain this—I only met
my mother once. I said, Do you know
a woman named Dorothy? Her face
was pale, she said, No—in that hard way.
Maybe her red sugar told her to run—
but before she left, she grabbed my arm,
said, I did have a sister named Dorothy,
but she died. Two inches away from her
dyed blond hair, I said, okay, but both
our inside bodies knew she was lying.
Some people call it eating weather—
the way you swallow what you know,
but keep it—later it rises like a storm
from another world, reptilian and hungry.
It’s the thickness that drives us and
stains us, the not asking/just coming/
the cunt alive and jewel-like/the uncut
garnet and the lava flow/it’s barbarism/
bloodletting/the most liquid part of us/
spilling/spreading/the granular red sea
of sap and gore/sinking/moving forward
at the same time/slippery/red
containing blue/it’s the sweet,
deep inside of the body.
