—for Margaret Walker and Molly Means

                                          Fri., July 2, 7:07 PM
                                         “Eat, the stones a poor man breaks,”

Fri., July 2, 7:18 PM
Still stale as they were
when Memaw died
Half-mad on working-class
hunger; plumpness thinned
to a chip of lamb’s bone,
legs decayed, necrotic.

                                         Fri., July 2, 7:26 PM
                                         Running is a game
                                         for the young. Women
                                         of a certain age, root.

Fri., July 2, 9:09 PM
Some rot gashing cane
with dull machetes. Sinking in
clay around 10-foot stalks when
all the while they could have been
coal-eyed peacocks, lean deep-water
ghosts, spunforce bladefeathers,
fear itself.

                                          Fri., July 2, 9:11 PM
                                          Can you believe I still carry
                                          the knife my husband gave me?
                                          I gut, hollow and scrape
                                          soft spoil from cavities, but
                                          what’s dead is pretty well empty.

Fri., July 2, 9:21 PM
Good on you. Makes for easy work.
My people are steel-clad nomads
at the full-metal brink. None
know what’s in the chamber,
staring down our barrels.

                                       Fri., July 2, 9:32 PM
                                       There’s 2 ways to terrify men:
                                       tell them what’s coming,
                                       don’t tell them what’s next . . .

Fri., July 2, 9:55 PM
(2/2) deathbed—herons,
black merlins, white-necked
ravens, mute Cygnus, Impundulu—

Fri., July 2, 9:54 PM
(1/2) Pales lower as light approaches.
Memaw felt all kinds of birds
hovering near her

                                      Fri., July 2, 10:07 PM
                                      What did Impundulu want?

Fri., July 2, 10:10 PM
Wondered myself. She named
ancestors and gods I’d never
met—
limbs of Osiris in Brooks Brothers,
Isis in Fredrick’s of Hollywood,
Jesus in torn polyester.

                                      Fri., July 2, 10:12 PM
                                      Ah, the birds wanted them then.

Fri., July 2, 10:17 PM
No. She said: They waitin’ . . .
for you.
Then she died,
eyes wide,
fixed on me.

                                      Fri., July 2, 10:28 PM
                                      Dinn, dinn, dinn—
                                      Dying’s last words
                                      mean nothing. What wants you
                                      dead would have your head.

Fri., July 2, 10:29 PM
LOL! But I’m not dead, huh?

Fri., July 2, 11:21 PM
I’m not dead, right?

Sat., July 3, 3:00 AM
Anne? I’m not, right?

Commentary

My name is Camille T. Dungy, and I am going to read a poem by Airea D. Matthews from her new book, Simulacra. The poem is called “Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory.”

There’s so much about this poem that just delights and astounds me, and truly makes me believe in the possibility of what American poetry can be, and who an American poet can be.

To begin with, I’m fascinated by the fact that Airea D. Matthews decided to set the poem as a text conversation, so that we’re moving back and forth between Anne Sexton and Tituba on separate columns, as they speak back and forth out of . . . what world? And the poem speaks into the future in this way, using the text message form, which just seems like such an American thing to do, to kind of think forward into the future, but also into the past—speaking through Tituba, who happened to be the first person who died in the Salem Witch Trials. She was a West Indian woman who was accused of witchcraft, for her practice, her use of her own cultural practices in that very puritanical space. Tituba—this kind of first black American victim of intolerant violence, essentially—having a conversation with Anne Sexton, who, herself, as an American woman poet, suffered from a lack of understanding of who she was and what her potential could be. And in some ways, we could think that her potential as a poet was clipped, in a sense, because it was too much about something that was not necessarily fully understood.

Another thing that’s interesting to me about this poem is how compelling it is as a textual object, as something that you read on the page. And so looking at the poem on the page gives me layers of meaning and potential and possibility that are different than the layers of potential that just come sonically when I’m hearing the poem out loud, or speaking the poem out loud. So that’s another gift that the poem gives to me, is potential for extra layers of experience with it. And the line breaks: they’re amazing; there are these wonderful spaces; like, she named ancestors and gods I’d never met, so we just have these moments where the language of these two word-women pops forward and becomes magical and full of multiple possibilities, also through time and space and potential, so that’s pretty great.

And then, the poem doesn’t even stop there; it communicates with Margaret Walker, and her own characters out of the book that won Margaret Walker the Yale Younger Prize. Molly Means is the character who I’m speaking of. Margaret Walker is the only other black woman to have won the Yale Younger Prize for Poetry before Airea Matthews won it, and so that communication through time and over poetry . . . and we can’t forget the fact that the poem ties in multiple times Arthur Rimbaud who, writing out of a different country, has fed what American poetry can be. And so, the kind of multiplicity of identities within the poem, right, of bodies and people and voices and dreams and visions. . . .

With humor, with joy, the birds that are mentioned, right, are birds in themselves, but all also carry with them these other potentials of thoughts and ideas; the Impundulu being a South African bird that has within all kinds of omens of death and future prognoses and things like this. The Cygnus, the swan, and all our ideas of what the swan could be in poetry, right? It’s just, the poem just keeps giving and giving, in just this kind of rich, exciting, fun, but haunting, (and haunted) way. I just can’t imagine a poem that could give me such a robust representation of multiplicity and possibility and potential. And so: yay for this poem, is what I have to say.

Commentator's Poem

              to breathe together

Last week, a woman smiled at my daughter and I wondered
if she might have been the sort of girl my mother says spat on my aunt
when they were children in Virginia all those acts and laws ago.

Half the time I can’t tell my experiences apart from the ghosts’.

A shirt my mother gave me settles into my chest.

I should say onto my chest, but I am self conscious—
the way the men watch me while I move toward them
makes my heart trip and slide and threaten to bruise

so that, inside my chest, I feel the pressure of her body,
her mother’s breasts, her mother’s mother’s big, loving bounty.

I wear my daughter the way women other places are taught
to wear their young. Sometimes, when people smile,
I wonder if they think I am being quaintly primitive.

The cloth I wrap her in is brightly patterned, African,
and the baby’s hair manes her alert head in such a way
she has often been compared to an animal.

There is a stroller in the garage, but I don’t want to be taken
as my own child’s nanny. (Half the time I know my fears are mine alone.)

At my shower, a Cameroonian woman helped me practice
putting a toy baby on my back. I stood in the middle of a circle
of women, stooped over and fumbling with the cloth. Curious George
was the only doll on hand, so the white women looked away
afraid I would hurt my baby while the black women looked away
and thought about not thinking about monkeys.

There is so much time in the world. How many ways can it be divided?

I walk every day with my daughter and wonder
what is happening in other people’s minds. Half the time
I am filled with terror. Half the time I am full of myself.

The baby is sleeping on my back again. When I stand still,
I can feel her breathing. But when I start to move, I lose her
in the rhythms of my tread.

• 

  Camille T. Dungy

  Camille T. Dungy (1972- ) was born in Denver, Colorado, and educated at Stanford University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade (2016), and one collection of essays. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Cave Canem, as well as two American Book Awards and two Northern California Book Awards. Dungy is currently a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

• 

  Airea D. Matthews

  Airea D. Matthews attended the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the poetry collection simulacra (2017), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her other honors include a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry. Matthews is a Cave Canem Fellow and Kresge Literary Arts Fellow, and currently serves as an assistant professor in creative writing at Bryn Mawr College.

Related Resources

• “Trophic cascade” by Camille T. Dungy (catalog record)
• “Simulacra” by Airea D. Matthews (catalog record)
• Camille T. Dungy External link (official website)
• Airea D. Matthews External link (Bryn Mawr College website)