The Last Words for Valentine’s Day
If Literature’s “Complicated Men” Were on Tinder by Sarah Chevallier, yonder at McSweeney’s
Now I can die happy, and also in love with Sarah Chevallier.
“…The next section of the collection following the one focused on artists is “Our Terrible Good Luck,” an apt oxymoron that encompasses the devastation that populates these poems on topics not often associated that kind of horror: motherhood and children. Oh boy, was this part of the collection hard for me. They’re just shattering to read: domestic abuse, the death of children, gun violence, mass murderers, the dark sides of motherhood, the physicality and sometimes grotesqueness of child birth. For me, they were painful and difficult to read, despite their being beautifully written. When I say devastating, this is what I mean:
In the month before they find your son’s body
downstream, you wake imagining
his fist clutching the spent elastic
of his pyjama bottoms, the pair with sailboats riding them
He’s swimming past your room toward milk and Cheerios
his cowlick alive on his small head, swimming
toward cartoons and baseballs, toward his skateboard
paddling his feet like flippers. You’re surprised
by how light he is, how his lips shimmer like water
how his eyes glow green as algae
He amazes you again and again, how he breathes
through water. Every morning you almost drown
fighting the undertow, the wild summer runoff
coughing into air exhausted, but your son is happy
He’s learning the language of gills and fins
of minnows and fry. That’s what he says
when you try to pull him to safety; he says he’s a stuntman
riding the waterfall down its awful lengths
to the log jam at the bottom pool
He’s cool to the touch; his beauty has you by the throat
He’s translucent, you can see his heart under
his young boy’s ribs, beating
as it once beat under the stretched skin of your belly
blue as airlessness, primed for vertical dive
HOLY FUCK, Jane Eaton Hamilton. I don’t remember the last time I read a poem so fucking sad and heartbreaking.” -Casey Stepaniuk
I rarely post anything that’s personal, but all day I had this column by the wise and clear and sensical writer Bear Bergman up on my “to-read” list, and I finally read it, and it seems to hit so many nails on so many heads that I thought you might want to read this “Dear Bear” column too, since rarely is there a time in relationships when incomes are exactly on par. Which may mean you think of these contentious matters, too.
And because it’s coming up Valentine’s Day, a day where we can all try to learn to love better.
Electric Literature put these out this morning. Happy Valentine’s Day, writers, from your text.
Valentine’s Day
by Jane Eaton Hamilton
If it starts to eye you
like a cinnamon heart
stand very still
blend into the background
of your dull life, into
laundry, dishes, stacks of paperwork
do all you can do
to avoid notice
become the yellow wallpaper
become the water in the trap of the sink
become sugar
Whatever you do
don’t imagine the gaping
burgundy mouth
the lips, the teeth of love
don’t imagine butterflies
Whatever you do
don’t sigh
Don’t think of dulcet dinners out
classical by candlelight
Don’t imagine love’s long eyes
her laugh, chocolate
or the slip of talented fingers
across your cheek
soft up your thigh
orgasm
Turn away, turn away
from your need
Run swiftly through your town
cover your head with your arms
cry Help me!
If love still lifts you to its fleshy tongue
like a cinnamon heart
holds you to its palette melting
don’t go under its teeth as if you won’t shred
don’t slide down its esophagus like you won’t dissolve
don’t leak into its intestines as if love
were enough (even for this)