I HATE NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OR IS IT GOD
I am a response
codified:
discordant murmurs fracturing
my heart chamber;
a real bloody mess.
Reactive system.
I push the crosswalk button.
I don’t push the crosswalk
button. Everything happens.
My best friend dies. I cross
the street. White man, Jeep Patriot, palming
his horn like my body
were underneath. I get a new job.
I don’t sleep.
Forces result from inter-
actions. Casually slip in
single at the art show. My sister gets married.
He’s my plus one. We dance.
We love. We sweat together on nights
another horn honks. I think it’s God’s final trumpet call.
The end of the world. My mother stops her chemo.
Doesn’t tell anybody. She is
happy. My father stops asking.
In my chamber the heart jumps, grips
iron bars of my ribcage, tears
sanctuary to shreds. Contact inter-
action. For every remission there is a
growth. Action-reaction. The kids in my building
screech and play, my mother dances around
the kitchen, the topic, a baby cries,
one of them gets hurt, my mother, she
tells me another story about a woman who healed her
cancer through carrots, through communion, Christ-endorsed
cancer prevention. Little boy feet rattle
the glasses on my bar cart, my mother tells me she
feels so good, no longer sick, my father says he’s
finally at peace, they’re no longer fighting,
a horn honks through force pairs
of smiling mandibles I am screaming.
Reactionary force. Tumor crawling back.
Like printed in ink versus
prevented. Foretold by Newton
or God. The baby has colic. Someone
is singing. Dissonant delusions. Only
a matter of time. Code
Red.
Sandra Riffler
Sandra Riffler lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from University of Cincinnati. She specializes in poetry and parallel parking on the left. Her themes often center around desire, panic, and the alchemy of every interaction we have as humans. She leads writing workshops and open mics at Household Books in her free time. You can find some of her work previously curated in Short Vine and Eunoia Review.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
I actually LOVE how these poems are speaking to each other AND I like how formally different they are AND they are honestly straight up bangers regardless.
First, I just love the voice in these poems. There is this snarky intensity that really speaks to me and I think fully works with the content. “Voice” is a hard thing to pin down but it’s kinda like, I know it when I see it right? And these poems have it. In one sense the snarkiness of the speakers interpretation of events gives it a zing, and the cacophony of noise and messages being sent to the speaker also act to set the tone. It’s really well done in each poem.
In BOTH poems the form is really doing them a favor. In “I Hate Newtons…” there is a literal push and pull between both the lines physically and the content, almost as if the poem is being pulled apart by centrifugal force (I know big words!!). In “To the Man…” the massive wall of text acts as a barrier between the speaker and the man, and it acts to represent the stream of thought that can happen when, as a female identified person, you feel danger emanating from a man you may have pissed off just by existing.
And on the individual line level, there are so many gems tucked inside these poems. Enjoy your digging!
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
Religious trauma! Verbing! Mom stuff! I really performed a case study while enjoying the past pieces published in Brawl, and time after time when I really felt like I resonated with a piece, it had been sent to Taylor. Originally it was a tough choice, but I think ultimately the themes I tend to write about and my poetic voice lent themselves to stuff that might make Taylor go 0_o. And it did!! Yay! (I think we like the same stuff, basically.)
How do you see these two in conversation with each other?
I appreciate this question because I’ve never really considered how these two specific pieces might communicate with one another. I think all of my poems tend to have an urgency to them. I am constantly evaluating situations in life and how everything connects. If they don’t connect, cool, I can take a breather. If they do — how? What does that mean for me & my environment? How will things change? People are also very central to my art because they are central to me. How are this person and I interacting? How is that affecting the world around me/us?
What was your writing process like for each of these poems and how did you approach form for them?
I LOVE form. One of the greatest things I took away from undergrad (besides the importance of an intentional title) is how formatting is as important to the piece as the words themselves. My writing process essentially looks like spitting out a poem in the format it wants to be in. Sometimes I’ll change the form after a few lines if I don’t think it’s congruent with the subject matter, but most of the time it just happens as it happens. I don’t overthink. For “I HATE NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OR IS IT GOD,” I was inspired by the form a friend used, and appreciated this physical/visual push/pull that I think is prevalent in the poem. “TO THE MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT IT’S LIKE PLAYING POOL WITH WOMEN” also came out in a fury. It wants to be a pantoum but can’t quite figure out how to get there. John Hollander summarizes: “Pantuns in the original Malay / Are quatrains of two thoughts, but of one mind.” If you can relate to the piece, you’ll know the swarm of thoughts that tends to happen in situations like that. It’s never as clean cut as you want it to be. Both of these pieces were birthed by me attempting to take some kind of control over situations that were taking control of me.