Cool for You1 Interrupted Cento
In my childhood I often got the message
that I was a worthless little animal.An animal
or an accident. I felt like I was lying at the bottom
of a well watching the world fall away. [But]
I was [just] trying to relax. I was [just] trying
to not die right away. I was [just] trying to not
[just] start clenching my fists. I was [just] trying
to stay awake. I was [just] trying to be human.
I was [just] trying to remember who I was. I was
[just] trying not to fall down on the ground.
It was like I was nobody. It was like my face
was so big. It felt like a witch thing. I had [just]
one kind of power—art, an occasional spectacle.
Other than through punishment, [art] was how
I paid my dues. I [just] wanted to go home,
where I had never been. My pain made me sing.
We were being prepared to be waitresses or what?
Wives. Ladies. I don’t understand, I would say
[…] I wanted to be an astronaut, and then I was
sitting here. The person most miscast in my movie
is me. I just wasn’t nice. I hated them. I felt hot.
I wanted to lie down on my window seat. I was
around ten. I was in a sweatshirt. My mouth [just]
wouldn’t work. You know I don’t want to tell
this much of a story. In my family we [all just]
talk a hot fuck. It's taken me years [and years
and years and years and years] to get this way.
1 By Eileen Myles, Soft Skull Press, 2000
Poem Beginning with Two Lines Ending a Poem by Bob Hicok
It is comforting to talk to large animals, whether they listen or not.
I said, it is comforting to talk to large animals, whether they listen
or not. And it is comforting to talk to the dead. And to a tiny old woman
holding a sombrero in a big city like Philly in an Uber or a Lyft.
As for the brook’s nonstop yammering to that little mob of does
always so famished before the big snows? That water’s comforting
too, Bob, like “o” sounds are comforting when your mother’s a Phoebe
outside the window in the Adirondack Mountains that she never visited
because when she was a person she hardly went anywhere but into
her kitchen. And now here she is pecking at crickets with her tail feathers
so sharp and spikey it’s like she’s punk or postpunk in the afterlife
& hence polytextual if that’s a real word, which I am telling you it is.
And what to say that will do any good is what I need to know. I said,
and what to say that’ll do any good is what I need to know. And how
to really mean it in the outrageous thenceforward of what’s left of us
here on the awful awesome awful awesome awful awesome Earth.
Adrian Blevins’s most recent book of poetry is Status Pending (Four Way Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. Her other full-length collections are Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. She also co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers, and is the recipient of many additional awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.