Bumper Sticker that Reads Keep Honking! I’m sitting in my car crying to the Cranberries’ 1993 hit single “Linger”
Good one, but for me it’s “Dreams”
& I tried to tell my daughter “this is an all-time banger” though it came out like [high whine] because these days verbally admitting to liking anything makes me cry
& it’s particularly bad with pop songs, which feels like a non-problem to bring to a therapist so I have not brought it to a therapist (or myself to a therapist)
& in my head “poem” = “aesthetic triumph of stress
& concision” so let’s agree this is definitely not a poem
& my hands used to be so concise is a thought I had while washing them
& just this week I said to a physician’s assistant “I think I am getting better at managing my emotions” which is a hell of a thing to say while actively crying
& a journalist back then referred to watching the video for “Dreams” as his having “endured” it, how he hoped Dolores O’Riordan (RIP) had “more compelling dreams than trotting around with a white horse and digging up hunks in the countryside”
& the journalist praised O’Riordan’s “Sinéadish wails” (RIP) in a way that makes me think all girls probably sound the same to him when wailing
& this week someone referred to me as a woman & I announced “I intend to die the world’s oldest girl;” the announcement was by internal memo
& I am reckoning with aphantasia meaning my memories are more feeling than pictures
& people really like visual description
& looking at old photos they are inaccurate because I know I was so much uglier then
& remembering having worn a loose interpretation of a forest green cheongsam from Macy’s to a wedding where an actual man with red hair asked me to dance, I cringe
& I said no because I really wanted to dance with him
& the older ladies said I was “being so mean couldn’t I just”
& I remember thinking I could absolutely marry this red-haired man, I could become a valued part of his burgeoning sporting goods empire in the suburbs of Philadelphia
I had a whole plan
Begin the Begin
Sometimes I want to open a book just like R.E.M. did Lifes Rich Pageant, an incandescent Peter Buck guitar line rising off my page. Furious, snarling, a statement of intent.
But sometimes I’d rather draw a poem for you as quiet as a bath, as unreliable as a bath, warmth dissipating from the moment it’s drawn. An opening more like “Drive” on Automatic.
Hey, I don’t know these——ok, thanks for stopping by?
“Drive”’s hushed litany of maybes when maybe is a poet’s cardinal sin. Cardinals or other small birds, these are our venial sins. See also: hands, hearts, souls, the moon.
All my training insists an opening poem must grab a reader. Spirit the reader away. Should be unimpeachable. Impeccable.
Sometimes defined as “not liable to sin,” maybe impeccable is a cruel word to hang on a poem. An opening poem is tasked to spellbind a reader. Liable comes from ligare, to bind.
Some readers ask to be seared.
Cast iron is best for developing a seared crust, the Maillard reaction, something-something.
Place your seared reader in a preheated oven. You should expect the reader to lose some of its juices, so be prepared to baste periodically. A dry white is best, but stock or water will do. Let the reader rest before serving.
Maybe don’t read this if you want to be seared.
Don’t read this if you need to have a bad day. Don’t read this if you need to have a good day. Reader, I cannot know your moods.
Like the nosy neighbor who bursts through the door in a sitcom, I cannot accurately imagine the fullness of another life I’m interrupting.
The opening poem is often a nosy neighbor; the rest of the story is what happens back in her house. Dust dampens her noisy corners. A dozen beach-toned eggs are turning in her fridge. The dotted outlines of spirit plums hover in a bowl.
Yes, we’re wandering. Don’t look at me like that.
Where else do you have to be?
Maybe you need to immerse yourself in Belly’s fuzzy, frothy guitars & come back to this poem later.
Maybe get belatedly into Blake Babies with me. A critic of Blake Babies’ early work derided Juliana Hatfield’s idiosyncratic voice as “thin & girlish.”
What this says to me is there is no winning.
Maybe you’re saying to yourself if you like talking about albums so much why not make an album instead of [gestures broadly] whatever’s going on here?
Maybe my best answer is that a guitar does nothing in my hands except sit there like a dummy whose vocalist has died.
I don’t know.
We don’t know if non-human animals dream because they cannot tell us, though we observe behaviors much like dream-studded sleep in them.
A horse may, given the right set of improbable circumstances, dream of wandering a grocery store, nosing produce in the bright & misty troughs—— though whose concern is this but the horse?
Sometimes I think about all the ways we’re asked to marshal a poem & it feels like dieting for the imagination.
Sometimes I think about Cassius via Shakespeare. The legacy of his lean & hungry look, etc.
Sometimes I don’t want my dressing on the side. Kitchen, in your own time— but I’m here, go wild.
Cassius, too, dies in the end.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the author of the full-length collection Girl in a Bear Suit (Elixir Press, 2024) and the e-chapbook Disambiguation (Salamander/Suffolk University, 2024). She is the winner of the Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Recent work has appeared in or is coming soon from The Common, On the Seawall, SIR, Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, and Banshee. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and serves as the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. More at jenjabailyblackburn.com. Her favorite revenge story? Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.
