5/2/2024

Clay Pots and the Haunted Wilderness: Week 4 of National Poetry Month

Of course we are a day or so late with our last recap of National Poetry Month. A little too much exhaustion, a little too much reveling in our success, but I deserve that joy, that laziness, and no deadline should keep me from it. 

I’m pleased to report that we did it, folks. We wrote thirty poems in thirty days. We (almost) wrote a recap each week on top of that. We submitted some of them. We need to write even more of them, but a vague and beautiful book shape is starting to come into focus. I’m immensely proud of myself. Moreover, my friends accomplished their goals, too. More than the body of work, that’s what I’m happy with. It really is the friends we made along the way. 

I’ve read more poetry this month than I have in the last three combined. I attended workshops, remote open mics, I tried to better my craft. I feel like I have. Too often, at the end of a writing challenge like this, there’s the feeling like the protagonist’s discovery of the psychic in Clive Barker’s prologue to Books of Blood:

“He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be their page, their book. A book written in blood. She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she’d seen them, touched them…”

It’s easy to feel like you’ve been beset by ghosts, all carving their stories into your skin with a vengeful impatience. I felt carved up, cut open, and somehow beatified by that injury. And now, with all the blood on the floor and all the violence done with, it is time to edit, to heal.

“And after a time, when the words on his body were scabs and scars, she would read him.” 

I look forward to letting you read them, to tell the stories of these ghosts. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are about my breasts, part of my 36 Views project that I started in November. I now have forty of them. Forty poems in only a few months. Forty wailing ghosts finally laid back into a well-tended garden of words. Surely I, these poems’ humble undertaker, can finally rest or move on, but no.

There are still poems about my breasts to write. They won’t seem to let me go until they’re satisfied and they are far from satisfied. My gender feels very much like a seance in these moments, calling forth all the unruly souls of the girls and women I could’ve been but for a maelstrom of societal and circumstantial factors. Now it is my duty to put them to rest in the graveyard of my body, to give each of them their flowers. I am a field of gentle epitaphs. I am a haunted house full of so many soft hands and quiet songs. These women have finally found a mouth with which to scream all their sadnesses and joys. It would be rude to plug my ears because I’ve “done enough.” 

One of my favorite movies is Chi-Hwa-Seon, a Korean movie known internationally as Painted Fire. It tells the story of Jane Seup, a 19th Century Korean master painter known as Oh-won. Throughout the movie, he learns his trade and develops his craft and, most interestingly, grows old. It’s a beautiful meditation on what it means to let a passion grow with you in every sense. From imitating other artists to developing his own style to being renowned throughout Korea, Oh-won remains the same as much as he changes, until the movie’s incredibly memorable end:

After all his decades of life, Oh-won decides to join a monastery of potters. He is a master painter but has never tried this other discipline. He’s terrible at making pots, but he derives incredible satisfaction from making one. It makes him feel complete. Knowing that he cannot conquer it, that there’s not enough time in the world to completely master it, gives him a sense of peace, of finality. I want that.

I want to feel that way, to never tire or discover the limits of what my art can be. I want to continue to reinvent the ways I honor the ghosts inside me. The many graves of my heart. These lovers who are so close, but distant, still. 

I talk to my girlfriends every day. I look at pictures of them and so I see them every day. I feel close to them, and yet, they’re miles away from me. Long distance relationships can feel like a haunting sometimes, too. Their absence becomes a presence, echoes of the last time I saw them. To invite the distant lover is to host a phantom, a poltergeist whose touch could be the wind, whose love letter are written in the fog of mirrors. They’re omnipresent but distant until they’re not.

Ghosts are just the unfinished business of the living. Love and writing, for me, are businesses I hope I never finish. I hope I die vengeful and in need of more. I hope there’s a warped clay pot at the end of my life, a garden that’s still growing. I need it. If this last year has shown me anything it’s shown me the breadth of my inexperience.

My girlfriend loves to level this quote at me when I get to bogged down with life or in my own head, which is frankly too often. It took until literally today for me to look it up and, of course, it’s from Adventuring Party, the post-episode talkback series for Dropout’s Dimension 20. I shouldn’t be surprised, honestly. The most profound shit always seems to come from the strangest of places. One day I got a fortune cookie with five fortunes in it that I’m pretty sure predicted my next relationship. I got the title for my next writing project from the Chipotle app. We don’t choose our muse.

Anyway, they’re talking about Little Red Riding Hood and Emily Axford says “maybe there’s no moral.” And Brendan Lee Mulligan, the fucking Frisch’s Big Boy come to life, says it out of nowhere. 

“There’s no moral. The wolf eats you one day and until then, the forest is beautiful.” 

I spent so much of my early life literally calling out to the wolf to come early. Now that I actually want to live, I’ve been noticing the forest. It is beautiful. It’s full of so many interesting trees and animals. I intend to look at as much as I can so when the wolf comes, I can die with my blood thick and full of all the regret of what beauty I let slip away, so I can better savor the beauty I managed to hold onto.

That’s what writing is, for me. I’m holding onto beauty. I’m trying. All month I’ve been writing about my breasts to better hold onto the miracle that they exist at all. I write about the loves in my life to hold onto their smiles and eyes and memories. I don’t want to lose the forest for a single moment.

All month long I’ve been remembering that. 

Now that April’s over I have unfinished business. 

I have so much more to hold onto.

Yours, with an open mouth,

-B