Poems from the inside
From October 2015 through April 2016, I taught poetry with the Pongo Teen Writing Project, serving on a team of five mentors at the Child Study and Treatment Center (CSTC), Washington’s only public residential psychiatric facility for youth, located in Lakewood, Washington. The experience was life-changing – at times depressing, occasionally frightening, constantly emotional and ultimately redemptive. For the privacy of the students I don’t disclose very much about the process of working with them, or the reasons they more than many others benefit so deeply from the ways writing can help us process trauma and find our voice.
Teaching writing in this environment, as in any detention facility (including juvenile detention, where I taught again with the same organization in fall of 2016), is very stressful and can produce in teachers feelings of fear, anxiety and rage, and memories of past trauma. To cope with these effects, we are encouraged to respond to the experience with our own writing (we don’t share this with students; it is for us). The poems we write are often created using the same prompts we give students, or navigate the same themes, or converse with the students’ own work. These are a few of the poems I created while teaching in the youth psychiatric facility through one winter.
Pantheon
Every night there’s a space when the light is
Flickering like a gaslamp, turning the laundry heaps gold
When the plug-in heater is clicked on just as the rain spills
Outside and it’s time to open the faucet so the old cat
Gets a drink before bed
The doors of our daughters’ bedrooms creak
As you move in to pull the covers up dodging the mortal danger
Of Legos and a book about Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon
This antiquated house groans at every passage
But silence would trouble us more
The large hands of a father also pour a careful cup of tea
Just as a moon bulges over the mucked-up yard
Where we forgot to disappear the puppy’s poop
Oh well. The chores are shelved, there’s leftover
Ramen and chicken strips for tomorrow’s lunch
Soon I’ll draw a bath and scatter salts like a water goddess
You’ll come tripping up with mugs, dog-tired
But impossibly happy in the dimming day
Welcome 2016
Cosmic:
The flipping
Of another page
Came to me
On the darkest night
A turning. I whispered
I will let it be
Surely freezing rain
Might hit
If it does
I will let it
Just now an
Old chicken is
Dying
Out back
The planets are
Spending themselves
In the daylight
Bodies are being
Killed by other
Bodies
Deep inside
My chest is an
Angry muscle
The short days are here
I will let them be
But this year
I will seek out
Women
Supernovas of the system
To constellate myself
I will let them be
My asterism of
Hope
Not a pleasure cruise
If there is one thing that makes me blink
It’s the word forgiveness, with its demands,
Extended middle syllable and serpentine tail
You might as well add a capital F every time
It’s the word forgiveness with its demands
To release broken toys and feuding brothers
You might as well add a capital F every time
To Ferry the Friend with cancer I Forgot
To release broken toys and feuding brothers
You must stand at the bow, toss your luggage over
To Ferry the Friend with cancer I Forgot
Demands a solid hull and well-sewn sail
You must stand at the bow, toss your luggage over
The sea of regret is a monstrous seiche, a Leviathan
It demands a solid hull and well-sewn sail
And a map to chart safe harbours
This country is so
Anthropologie is selling a rusty trash can for $200 The brand initially offered the West Village Corrugated Can for $148, plus shipping, it can now be had, however, for the starkly reduced price of $99.95 A family of six built a tiny house for a homeless man they never met and hauled it this weekend from the country to the city intending to give the hand-built structure to a “down-and-out” homeless person The house was meant to be a gesture of love? But in the end it felt like a coffin because it was shaped just like one and the tent under I-5 felt more like home so the man went back there saying the donated house was “a good prototype” Across the lake a family built an upcycled urban beach cabin after, for one thing, life in the city proper became too wearisome “With four people in 1,000 square feet, we were living in Tokyo standards,” the father said For another, someone was building a giant city seawall, all day, every day, right outside their windows Now happily light pours down the second-floor birch ply stair treads inside the home clad in charred shou-sugi-ban Douglas fir Bernie says be unhappy and dejected about the 1% A children’s picture book just released by Scholastic shows George Washington’s smiling slaves happily preparing a birthday cake for him A Hungarian woman does seven types of blackface to prevent Africa from going extinct Poverty porn is addicting our channels are dialed in 24/7 so don protection if you can My magazine editor posts a picture of an Israeli mother of six killed hours ago in her home in Otniel by a Palestinian terrorist but did not want me to assign a story about racism that brown and black families face every day in Seattle This country is so safe said my same boss who went on African safari for Christmas and posted pictures of herself cuddling a large-eyed African boy in her lap Luckily we wake up every morning and have almost nothing to be afraid of in this country she said.
Beauty Mask
It is good for a woman’s skin
To apply a nightly mask
Now and then they say
I find after a long day at work is
When I most crave the proper
Combination of water
Butylene glycol glycerin
To say nothing of Peg-40
Phenoxyethanol
Glycosyl trehalose and
Brassica oleracea (Broccoli!)
A magazine-clean face
Is the perfect canvas
For the bitter, gummy weight of
Matte lipstick made from
Rootbark, pig urine and
God knows what else
Ionic hair dryer revving
Like the Harley under a guy
Stalking you after the bars close
Follicles smelling of meat
Forgotten on the grill
All night long
The girdled clutch of angry
Seams and overpriced Spanx
Leaves our waistbands
Pocked and swollen and
For beauty
Asphyxiates
My
Vagina
Razor burns
Nail acetone
Gas pump perfume
Tarantulas dangling off my eyelids
A desperate James Bond heroine
About to lose her grip
Off the lip of a skyscraper
Fuck me heels start like a
Saw to the Achilles
Finish off the night as a nail
Pounding into soft foot flesh
With money these too can be yours
We will go as far
As we will go
Tight neck
Pleasing smile
Lively breasts
Sexy retinas?
The Willow
According to mysticfamiliar.com
based on my birthday my assigned tree
is the ash (for Ambition) ― uncommonly attractive
vivacious, impulsive, demanding
does not care for criticism, intelligent
likes to play with her fate
One year I was six at summer camp
While the gum chewing counselors with
cities of rubber neon bracelets up their arms
looked away I got lost
The day was so hot the grass died
right there around my ankles
Past dandelions, mushrooms, an elephant slide
Air like warm butter
The midday temperature so high the ground
steamed, heavy and wet,
the way the un-air-conditioned backseat
of our wood-paneled station wagon
off-gassed its leathery sweat.
Add: insects buzzing, and a
long-off lawnmower
Why is the one day I disappeared
three decades ago
so important?
Did the counselors lose me?
Was I a confused camper
poorly supervised?
I could have gotten lost
on purpose!
Wasn’t I after all the girl who
pressed a pudgy, indigo-smeared hand
onto the concrete pillar of the school
after finger-painting?
Vivacious, impulsive
likes to play with her fate.
In the Ogham alphabet the willow is
Saille, anglicised to sally which means a
sudden outburst of emotions or action
(to sally forth)
The Old French “saille” also means
to rush out suddenly
The Latin “salire” means to leap
Which girl then was I,
would I become—
A girl who roamed parks, sneaking off
A girl who would be lost,
or choose to lose herself?
While ash is the tree of life (or death)
Willow is the tree of enchantment
Old Man Willow
Whomping Willow
Wisdom of the Willow Tree
This is where I land
Lime-colored braids encircling
Mossy veil sweeping the ground
Inside a tree a room a hush
tiny heart bucking along
The whisper of space cordoned off
by green lace
I wait
To learn more about the Pongo program, listen to this PBS podcast.