[lit-ideas] April poems: Ai
- From: "Mirembe Nantongo" <nantongo@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 18:23:12 +0100
CHILD BEATER
Outside, the rain, pinafore of gray water, dresses the town
and I stroke the leather belt,
as she sits in the rocking chair,
holding a crushed paper cup to her lips.
I yell at her, but she keeps rocking;
back, her eyes open, forward, they close.
Her body, somehow fat, thought I feed her only once a day,
reminds me of my own just after she was born.
It's been seven years, but I still can't forget how I felt.
How heavy it feels to look at her.
I lay the belt on a chair
and get her dinner bowl.
I hit the spoon against it, set it down
and watch her crawl to it,
pausing after each forward thrust of her legs
and when she takes her first bite,
I grab the belt and beat her across the back
until her tears, beads of salt-filled glass, falling,
shatter on the floor.
I move off. I let her eat,
while I get my dog's chain leash from the closet.
I whirl it around my head.
O daughter, so far, you've only had a taste of icing,
are you ready now for some cake?
<><><><>
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ai/about.htm
"Born in Tucson, Arizona, the poet AI, pseudonym of Florence Anthony, looks to
a complex American multicultural ancestry--a Japanese father and a mother part
black, Choctaw, and Irish." [...]
"Her particular forte has been to adapt Robert Browning's dramatic monologue to
her own purposes, poems whose different voices speak of fracture, violence,
revenge, sexual hunger, as if to emphasize the human disorder both beneath (and
often enough at the surface of) society." [...]
"Ai's poems have the indirect effect of calling cultural definitions of all
kinds into question. A dramatic monologuist, she invents voices for those whose
entrapment in their cultural definition is most apparent. The speakers of her
poems include the obscure and despised who are usually presumed to have no
voice at all and those public figures who have become sheer icon, whose
cultural meaning subsumes anything they can be imagined saying."
<><><><>
After you read Ai you feel battered, but not battered in a way you can dismiss
or deny. I learned of her from George O'Brien, who is who knows where, now. I
hated typing this poem.
Best, Mirembe
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