gospel II
after hala alyan
of this room remember heat: three fingered fist & the uncertainty,
this burdened voice. the music buried beneath her coat, a proxy war
in wool as we hide the phones again & say practice. say ritual. say
track the watch, say never-always time for the soft fist of my body
to want, what if the State swallows us whole before i work up
the courage & the music playing (the war in her coat – not a war,
this travesty) but i am thinking about my cunt. of this bridge, again.
of those trees with their absence, the hurt circles & all that empty
no way to ask but those hands, those hands, i want it more. i want to
burn the photos in the hall & their claim: that theft, this ache. watch
me while i fall apart, i beg of you, help this fall apart, i beg of you.
all this to say: the walls only have ears when they can ruin us.
Em Roth
Em Roth (they/them) is an organizer and educator living in Boston. They believe in the promise of liberation and are enamored with the way goats look in the sunset.
Why it knocked Taylor out:
I may just be biased here because I just read "The Moon that Turns You Back" from Hala Alyan and this poem lives up to its “after”, but wow this poem is intense.
There's the language, which is riveting and in your face, and then there are like four different undercurrents all working so well in tandem. The body's want, and time running out. "The state" taking and taking and what if it's time we took something too?
All of it builds to a really powerful and punching ending line. And honestly in Mar's words after reading this poem... whew....
Okay let's talk craft though. I won’t spend as much time thinking about content here because a lot of this poem speaks for itself, but on a sentence level there are some interesting things happening. I’m always drawn to the imperative voice in poems and have been basically from the start. I think in general it’s a bold move when a poet takes authority over the reader. The poem starts with several imperative sentences, “remember,” then “say” repeated three times in the first stanza.
But then there’s a shift in voice to “what if?” almost as if the bravado of the speaker is falling away in the face of state enacted violence (and like who among us?). But finally in the third stanza, after the falter, the speaker returns not to imperative but to need. “I want…” and “I beg…” and instead of giving the speaker what they want, the poem ends in a mysterious open ended way. The walls will ruin us.
This poem will also ruin you in the best way so take some time with it alright? Like seriously go back up and reread it rn.
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
To be blunt and reference a movie I’ve never actually seen: bodies, bodies, bodies. I also resonated with Taylor’s discussions of religious trauma -- this poem isn’t specifically about that but, as the child of a preacher, I am still thrilled to be using the word “cunt” freely.
Talk to me about how you think this poem is in conversation with Hala Alyan?
First of all, an absolute doozy to be in conversation with her; I know, I know, I don’t ideologically believe in hero worship but c’mon. In her work, I feel such a tautness between love and atrocity, lust and displacement / devastation. I wanted to move with that feeling, reckoning with what it means to hunger, personally, in times of deep crisis.
This poem is particularly in conversation with her poem, Honeymoon, and draws the fragment “of this room remember heat” from that work. Her poetry always makes me feel warm under the collar, either from a sense of intimacy or a sense of intense need to act. I wanted to interact with that heat and all the different reasons it manifests.
Most importantly, I have been thinking about what she wrote for The Guardian. She speaks specifically of those in the Palestinian diaspora, writing that they “must root themselves in steadfastness, must engage not in the individualistic, late capitalist tacks of avoidance, detachment, distraction, productivity, but in the practices being modeled for us by those that are still there.”
I am not a member of the Palestinian diaspora. I do not have the experience of watching my people be actively slaughtered by a genocidal, colonial state. And, I believe it is up to all of us watching this almost year-long genocide to follow what she calls the practices of those still there. Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in all of historic Palestine, teach us all life. They teach us love and resistance.
A poem will not save lives. As Danez Smith writes, “no poem to free you,” and I believe that. I’m honored to be in conversation with Hala Alyan and even attempt to practice the life we are being taught.
And going off that as well, what was your thought process as you wrote this poem? How did this come to you and what was the process of shaping it?
In the midst of the continued genocidal onslaught of the Zionist entity, aided and abetted by the United States, I have been thinking deeply about what it means to desire as we sit here. In the belly of the beast of empire. How are love and desire so necessary and yet not enough?
As a newer poet, I am still learning the words for how I shaped something -- but I can say that I sat in my car and wrote down lines on my notes app. I sat at work during empty moments and thought about heat, thought about devastation. I was really stuck on editing the first stanza for a while until I had some clarity about love / action as a practice. Once again, it’s all about practicing what we are being taught.