Pygmalian and Galatea have been living rent free in my head / or a poem in which girlhood imitates myth
it’s the difference between a girl
and a lump of clay, wet, waiting
to be handled. the blood I suppose
and the tears, and the tears
I was born girl’d regardless of
the guilting and still I am
regressing, all of those years between eighteen
and twenty-five
going back
to the moment just before the moment
I knew I wasn’t a girl anymore
and I have been belonging to belonging
all my life, in that rotting sweet
way in that sea sick way and then
sweet again
but there’s always that bloodshot
and itching time
at seventeen when you at least
believe
you belong to yourself.
I tell my nineteen-year-old self that things are quieter than we expected, but it’s better
once, our newly caught scales would writhe
on the deck of another ship and we thought
this is good, this is best—kicking and all of our
throat-raw screeching—
we were making up for that symphony of pin-dropping
that haunted silence that tucked us in
every night and met us when we woke, the only noise
was in our dreams but our bodies are no longer so new,
neither are our silences so lonely
we built a bridge out of all of the doors we kicked open
we aren’t nickel and diming our worth by the nights
we can turn into mornings, begging to inhale whatever
will make them remember us
we don’t make bucket lists of ways to be remembered
we’re scared of different things now of time travel to the past,
of being you or young again
when we sigh now it doesn’t mean we are restless
it just means we are breathing we don’t claw retreating ankles
we kiss the soft nape of a neck that only intends to stay
she told us we’d never be okay and we took it as a compliment
the more we could thrash the more they would remember
we washed up on their shoreline
all of that to tell you we’re okay now and it’s better this way
Bleah Patterson
Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home and has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Electric Literature, Pinch, Grist, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
Now, to be fair I have been a Bleah Patterson fan for a while now. Originally, we published her at my other lit mag (phoebe) and since then every time I see a new poem from her I’m blown away. I think admitting this bias is important. The editors of your fav lit mags have poets they are fans of. I also wanna be clear that we didn’t solicit a submission (cause we don’t do that ever), so when Bleah submitted to me, safe to say I was LIT about it. (ha get it?)
But okay let’s talk about the poems!!
Pygmalian and Galatea have been living rent free in my head / or a poem in which girlhood imitates myth:
The form here is immaculate and perfectly gets at the performance of girlhood. The caesura give space for gender performance to permeate between some gut punching fragments. I see I lot of this poem in conversation with Sapphos fragments. Moments like “I was born girl’d” and “you belong to yourself” create a powerful tension between how the assignment of gender roles can try and pidgeon hole us, but in the end how we live our lives is up to us.
I tell my nineteen-year-old self that things are quieter than we expected, but it’s better:
In this poem, the line length expands allowing space (I think) for the “better”. When you’re a child, you think about the type of person you are going to be, and a lot of our expectations are set by the society around us. In this case, the speaker explores mythic hopes and dreams, but in the end comes to realize (much like in the first poem) the life we choose is the good life. When we have agency, we can create a life that is “better”.
All in all I think these poems are worth spending some time with. Make the life you want. You are allowed to exist outside whatever box you thought you needed to fit within.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
First, Taylor's description for what she's looking for felt like she was specifically asking for my work! Religious trauma, check! The body, check! The inheritance of religious trauma and weird body feelings, check!
Additionally, I'm just familiar with Taylor's aesthetic and know that it's similar to mine! I love working in community with poets who feel like we're in the same "school" or "era" and Taylor is definitely one of those and it's an honor to be added to her collection of acceptances.
This form is one I typically see you publish in, how did you come to settle into the fragmentary and how do you see yourself working within the form.
People ask me this a lot and I wish I had a really smart poet answer for it. The truth is that I got really bored of column poems, neat little stanzas, they didn't scratch all of the various itches of my brain. When I describe settling on this form to people, I always tell them it's like I bent down and just blew on the page. That's partially true, but I'm also really interested in enjambment, creating new and stronger meanings with line breaks, and also the potential for internal rhythm while reading a poem. TL;DR: just vibes, I guess?
What does your typical drafting process look like and how, if at all, did these poems deviate from or follow that typical drafting process? What does your poetic discovery look like and what did it look like for these poems?
I very often have a line that I'm simmering on in my notes app for a while. Gradually an image or some idea I really want to flesh out emerges and I go pull some of the lines from my notes and see how they can be cajoled to fit those images or ideas. It's just a little game of language Tetris with whatever visual, metaphor, or sound I'm obsessed with lately.