By Carrie Wang
Winner of the 2019 Spring Poetry Competition
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In the third-floor domicile, we bathe in cheap vodka
and flurried acumen, patchwork knees latticing the
Irishman’s wooden bed frame, laughing hee-ha-hee
as the pretty-girl triumvirate with butter-colored smiles
clinks around plastic champagne glasses with cinched
curves like the city’s,
and I try not to
ruminate on
that other night, my
barbed wire fists fighting
flippant jellyfish fingers
clawing
flesh&hair,
my mouth a muted
echo chamber for
retrograde rationality—
Now Mary and May are crying into cups holding
glistering dirt, spiting the straw-haired boy and his damn
breadwinner ego while we slapstick heave hoo-hoot-hoo,
heads bouncing round like ruddy baubles, gummy eyeballs
creased over a plastic card game lettered sans serif:
snip-edged like me,
and I don’t want to
celebrate this
wilted year, caustic
charcoal still lodged in
throat by fusillade
demarcations of
me-then&me-now,
so I clamp down on
sawdust breath, simply
watch the rodeo—
and I take the whoops and the bim-bams as they
catapult like birds to the mattress, cobbling organs
into a scaffold of macerated bodies huddled away from
the frigid open window and
the morning it will soon spell
when tomorrow hangovers split foreheads
and they will feel with me that
ineffable longing for
whatever comes
after the aftermath
Critique
Overall, this is an excellent poem (it won our competition, after all!), so I’m just going to briefly cover what you did really well and then provide a couple of minor suggestions.
You use language in a really effective way that endows the poem with strong cadential and visual elements. You’re able to extract a lot of perceptual elements out of the scene, producing something that feels visually and auditorily alive. You provide imagery that is both visceral and unique, and that clearly does not rely on language or phrases we hear often in the public sphere. This is something that is clearly your own, that differentiates your own voice from that of other writers. Well done!
One aspect of your poem that I particularly enjoy is the contrast between the party and the assault scenes. These two sections differ sharply in tone, working together to simulate an experience that (I believe) a lot of women face but is often hard to “get at” as a writer. You do great work with this, but I’d recommend editing the second “blocked” stanza such that its connection with the first (the one about the assault) is made slightly more explicit. If you read this stanza by itself, it’s unclear what it’s referring to or what it’s talking about; "me-then&me-now” is pretty generalized and could apply to any number of experiences, so it would be best to tailor this stanza to the specific experience that you’re interested in writing about. When I first read the poem, I was unsure why this stanza was there, and its abstractness feels disjointed when the rest of the poem is so specific and visceral.
Overall, your word choice is excellent, but some lines feel a bit clunky:
1. 1st stanza, 2nd line: I’m not sure “acumen” works here
2. 2nd stanza (first blocked stanza), 5th line: “flippant jellyfish fingers” don’t seem very menacing or like they could “claw” very much at all
3.4th stanza (second blocked stanza), 8th line: “clamp down on sawdust breath” might be better as “sawdust tongue”