Abecedarian Offering to an Absent God
(This poem is best viewed landscape or on a desktop to preserve the form)
Aching, because every day the
blood of our unseen God gets thicker in the sky. No, I
can’t write what I mean – I’m
deftly fumbling through the dark with my hands,
every finger clinging to both the truth and the way I hope to
forget it. I watch the News intently, as if my parents might appear in it;
getting older, limbs sagging as they watch me wait out the storm.
Have I forgotten how to long for something better?
I watch the News that runs, relentless, like ticker tape.
Just out of reach, God is watching through a hurricane’s eye,
keeping tabs on his blundering creations as we
lose ourselves to the crush and pull of rivers, the
mud-logged currents of our own design. The News says
nothing can prepare us for the age of self-immolation we usher forth,
our prophets grinning ear-to-ear, biting their tongues,
pupils dilated with the pain of knowing the future and doing nothing. Here’s a
question for you, God: why watch at all? In living
rooms, extinguished and silent, all across America we believe we
still might have a chance at salvation, even as the heat builds around us, as
the pavement rattles with trucks that could carry bodies or trash or the
unraveling truth the News keeps locked in the back of its throat. God loves a
victor, true. He also loves a starved mouth; loves a spilling gut and a boiling
winter; God loves an army, an offering, a past tense. God tells me
x marks the spot, one final gesture toward my body. Aching for my
youth, for dreams of absolution, lost in a biohazardous wasteland, our blood a
zoo of catastrophe and desire. What comes next, God? What is left to offer?
Daniel Brennan
Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and coffee devotee from New York. Sometimes he is in love, but just as often he is not. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in numerous publications, including The Penn Review, Sky Island Journal, and ONE ART. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @dannyjbrennan
Why Taylor Loved It:
Well first a confession: I'm afraid of this form and I think to pull it off well is so impressive and shows Daniel’s great control over language! Setting constraints is one way poets show both their connection to larger poetic craft, and their ability to weld that craft to fit their needs. Daniel is putting on a masterclass here, folks.
There are SO MANY LINES in this poem that had me pissed off that I didn't write them: "clinging to both the truth and the way I hope to/forget it" and "God tells me/x marks the spot, one final gesture toward my body." being just two of them. I mean come on, x marks the spot while God points at your body?! Just sit with that for a bit, then go back and reread the poem and sit with it some more.
The push and pull between God as (absent) truth, The News as (divisive) truth, and the self as (ultimate) truth is so compelling as well. This poem had me reckoning with what an apocalypse might actually look like, and then I was like…oh we’re in it already. Any poem that has me questioning reality the way this poem does, is a winner in my book.
Interview with Daniel
Why did you choose "Team Taylor" when deciding who to submit to?
I cannot resist writing poems that either deal with my existential reckoning with a religious childhood or an over-awareness of the human body in today's ecological landscape, so it seemed like the perfect fit! But really, the themes and subject matter Taylor seemed drawn to are very much the same ones that appear frequently in my work; so, there really was no choice at all!
How did you approach the form when writing this piece? The Abecedarian is a tough cookie for many writers to crack!
In the last few years, I've found that conventional forms (whether an abecedarian or a pantoum, etc.) have become mega-valuable devices; they force me to examine what story I'm telling in an entirely new light. It almost becomes a puzzle I'm solving?
With the Abecedarian, on a technical level, I quite literally put the whole alphabet down first, line by line, and then just kick off from there (I find having the framework already half-imagined an important set of guide posts). With this one, it came very 'stream of consciousness' after having a long conversation with friends over a recent ecological disaster (why pick just one at this point though!). But by having the first letter of each line on the page already, my brain was preemptively cooking up images and turns before I'd even get to the break.
Any form can be daunting as hell, but I cannot recommend them enough, if only to force your brain to try speaking what it wants to say in an unexpected way. I remember seeing a comment somewhere the other day that said something to the effect of "Are you writing in couplets because it serves the poem or because it's just more comfortable that way?" and as a big couplet girlie, I was gooped. Like damn, really read me with that one hahaha.
If you ran into this poem in a dark alley, which part would you be the most afraid of and why?
Ooooooh, this is tough. I'd have to say the line breaks, because you never know what those shifty bastards are going to do haha. But also, in this poem I always had this sense of monstrosity; some bio-wasteland, apocalyptic creature that's sort of lurking there behind the scenes, the outcome of all our actions and inactions. He'd seem pretty unpleasant and toothy I bet.