Insecure and dysphoric and bodily dysmorphic and unemployable and
now she’s asking everyday over these applications, as she should,
but I don't think that mom ever believes it
when I strike an iron colder than a corpse: digging mass graves for every beaten dead horse,
decomposing across abandoned farmland. Suddenly,
I’ve brought bubonic back from retirement.
There's no interview to shave for, there's no mirror in the bathroom!
I’m too stubborn to claim that ugly wincing as my own.
I’m too tired to brush my hair and now it’s matting up like stodgy tumors;
I’m plodging, pensive, like an emasculated plague doctor.
Territory wars break out between the breakouts and the dried skin.
I’m alluding to a gendered noose in everything I write and wax,
but it doesn't hang on me like it used to. Maybe I'm no longer tethered
to ever getting to unpack all the imperfections under unsheared sheep. Of fantasies
still counting in my sleep: identity, and employment opportunity.
Jump the fence, and free the weight (clear conscience clears the prison gate!).
Musing through the day with my sloppy barnyard soulmate:
an ironed out, iron-deficient, viscous, vicious, unachieving brain.
We talk plans: about shearing my sheepish fears,
about the blade, about castration.
“I should wait, until after my parents die, to burn the barn and start my life.”
It’s never been their fault, though,
that I’m published proof of destroyed matter.
Not of my panicking mother, who finds her son takes jobs duct taping bathroom mirrors
so he can wash his hands in peace, so he can't grimace at his cavities,
or check his weight, or check his hairline; poke his scars, or brush his teeth in the dark.
Illusions of a better life, or willfully blind to the lucidity —
the you you are, or the ewe you thought you’d always want to be.
Whether they’re the same, or paralleled across two different storybooks:
have you any wool?, or have you any will to find
what fine print thins the fine line? Between
timelines where I’m where I want to be, and ones where I’m just filling up
my email inbox with automated job application confirmations.
Notices from baby monitors, over crybaby bank accounts. I’m
accounting for the guilt I harbor, knowing someone’s always worked hard for
my health and my future, and knowing that it's never been me.
Staring at an unsheared sheep, and all I see are
self-abusive angles stemming from the incomplete.
The trajectories I stopped in their tracks.
Closure cords time-bitten and splayed out in half.
Sentences cut short
by tangents, taking tongues cut clean.
I want to volunteer all my perseverance,
and become a thing that torches.
Stoke the flame and burn the barn,
bury all the horses, and learn how to move on.
Steven C. Wright
Steven C. Wright is a poet and prose author from Edison, New Jersey. His work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press and londemere lit. He promises to be better at networking and sharing at some point, at @stevencwright_ on Instagram and Twitter.
Why Martheaus loved it:
The first question I asked Steven was, “How in the world did you pull this off?!” There's tonal dissonance, silly rhymes, it's nearly two pages, it's a stream of consciousness, and it even uses exclamation points!!!! This would rumble many a poet's tummy. I think that rebellion is what grabbed me by the scruff (in a warm momma lion way). This is not a "delicate" poem–it's not an 8-line ode with crystalline language and a 5-beat count. Those are great and all, but this isn't trying for that. Its awkward edges (and I mean that with love) evoke this feeling of the poem being written in one explosion–one swoosh of an evening.
Our site says we don't like rhymes unless you're Kendrick Lamar. We've turned down a lot of great poems that use rhyme because Taylor and I don't really connect with the style. Though here, the overabundance of alliteration and near/close rhymes lent to the play and strangeness enough to make me rethink my "policy." I typically don't go for rhymes because it seems to lighten the content's subject too much, restrict the potential for more specific words, or the pattern becomes so strict/expected that the poem loses an element of surprise. This thumped me against the head with this one because it's using its sound work in such a manic and interesting way. The popping Ps and Bs and Ds in lines like "I’m plodging, pensive, like an emasculated plague doctor. / Territory wars break out between the breakouts and the dried skin" create a feeling of fun that seems to defuse and add levity to the depression that these body concerns bring up. But then we get to stanza 5 and the consonance strikes the ear in a much more grading way. So the rhyme and heavy alliteration are being used as soothers and intensifiers in the same poem; that's a hard one to pull off.
Is it just me or do poets often get asked "why don't you write something a little happier?" I love happy poems, but I also love poems like this. Poems where I can see and feel and give my spirit to a speaker who just needs to get some shit off their chest–who's scared about their job prospects, who feels ugly sometimes, who wants to be wanted, who wants to be accepted by their family. This is a musical rant, and I–for one–feel a lot happier after having read it and received a moment's relief.
Interview:
Poetry often gets a reputation for its meticulousness: strict meter, a pattern of rhyme, and phrasing that appears as though it has been labored over for dozens of dog years. What drew me to this poem was its urgency and its almost improvisational quality. How did this style come about?
The initial steps of writing for me is a lot of letting my brain drive the car without brakes. I like to think I'm meticulous, but most of that might be from constant editing after I initially tuckered myself out on the page. Often, the most active part of my process is my obsession with the way words sound, what other words they sound like, what words they can be followed by, etc. It's why I wind up landing on a lot of frantic and slant rhyme, homophones, and things that (hopefully!) register as clever in my head, in a wordplay sense. It can be a bit of a curse if I aim to get something succinct and pointed on the page, and then I blink and it's 10x longer and goes in so many more directions. I'm still learning when and where not to push hard on the gas, but it can be a blessing too; because sometimes the best catharsis as a writer is to go full pedal. Likewise, sometimes the best catharsis as a reader is engaging with a piece by someone who really lets themselves free of boundaries to write it. I try to do that for myself, in both senses.
Sheep, barnyards, horses (of the dead variety). Am I speaking to a farm kid? How do you see the setting-building and influence of place coming across in the poem?
Truly, I am the antithesis of a farm kid. I am indoors to a fault. Though the influence of place for this poem came from somewhere that means a lot to me and my writing, and as such I've got a little spiel. I graduated college at the very start of 2020, and for the next 2 years, at the height of COVID, I had really hit a lull with writing as a hobby. I was writing all the time during undergrad at Rutgers, but it wasn't until I took my first (then my second, and then my third) poetry class with Susan Miller, that my brain unlocked this full love for workshop, and the ability to share writing back and forth with a group. I could wax nostalgic about all that for hours (and I have), but those classes, and the energy and humor and care and attention Prof. Miller gave each week in embracing everyone's work was something I had missed a lot. It was so fulfilling to be part of the give and take of straight up bearing my heart to a room of peers. Fortunately, some of my best friends are also writers, so about 2 1/2 years ago we started meeting for our own little workshop about 4 times a month. Someone will give an idea, or a theme/challenge of sorts, and we'll meet up at the end of the week and share what we wrote and discuss things together. I'm really grateful for that process and it's resulted in a lot of pieces that I'm proud of. I owe the way this particular setting came about in part to my friend Christy, who gave our workshop group "unsheared sheep" as a topic to work with last October. I immediately thought, rather dramatically, "you know, sometimes I have the energy of an unsheared sheep." Then the rest sorta spilled out from that one connection drawn: of being "stuck in the barn" with so much weight matting all over you. It was a really stifled image, and I wanted to complement all that imagery with a reflection on the way I've stifled myself, and let it take that shape.