November/December 2022
Zoeglossia Poem of the Week Series: Lineage. Grounding, and the Story of Self
Curated by Liv Mammone
In the last several weeks, to say nothing of the first few years of this decade, I have attended several truly crack-the-soul-open, very queer, very disabled book releases. E.J. Schoenborn’s release party for their chapbook, The Eye Opens, was a virtual church of queer chronically ill poets including my dear friends Gigi Bella G, Adrienne Novy, and Alice Page. Several weeks later, I watched Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Sami Schalk discuss Alice Wong’s new memoir because Alice needed to focus on healing from a medical emergency and could not do her own promotion. In curating this series for the month of November after experiencing both these liminal, disabled spaces, it was borne in on me how much the digital world and the speaking of the poem have created, for me, a lineage of disabled poets. I cling to this in times of deep uncertainty about my work and its necessity. All the poets featured here have been my teachers, sometimes very literally, whose work I have seen performed digitally. In their work, we learn what they, in turn, look to in the lineage they exist in or have found. These lineages often exist as tethers in the poets’ landscapes of physical, mental, and emotional pain. The poets employ startling, sharp imagery and each create a mythology of the self in order to make concrete the intersections of their lived experience.
To witness the work of Jessica Reidy (she/they) is to be expanded. After hearing them read their poem, White Caravan, and having the top of my skull sawed off, I am unspeakably proud that she offered it to this space. Jessica adopts her own mother’s voice to discuss cultural violence, assimilation, spiritual belief, ancestry, love, and death. Jes creates their mother speaking to how she created herself. One of the poem’s many delicious flavors is its juxtaposition of images delicate and corporeal. “Horse-drawn teacups shudder/all porcelain and wet leaves/clattering down my calcified lungs/as I breathe and breathe.” Or, my personal favorite, “The moon is a tendon-raw joint/for me to scream at. Once, I loved her/and only spoke soft words,/Latchi, Latchi, goddess of the good./I’m entitled to my anger, and my angels.” Jessica knows, and has learned via the blood, how to move between the details of life and lineage and another dream landscape. I believe it is that skill as a writer that allows her to explain the concepts she teaches and the invitations she extends to others. Whenever I’m in proximity to her, I feel invited into her greatness and I brim full with gratitude to be allowed there. This poem is a portal. We are being allowed to witness. I think it an immense act of bravery for Jessica to take on her mother’s voice. The poem’s form is such an object of radical artistic risk and radical empathy. What could we create if we were willing to so thoroughly take on a point of view? They use this poetic construction to elevate and eulogize with the deepest love but while also engaging with the complex truths of life. She is very adept, in the web and world of this poem, of balancing everything encompassed by the people she is writing about. I am drawn, again and again, to what I see as the scale of this poem. It is a poem about everything balanced by the members of a lineage and its form mirrors the balancing. I learn a great deal from Jessica and feel fortunate to be able to read their creation of where they learned from.
Nathan Say (he/they) was one of the first of a very small number of visibly disabled poets I saw during the 2000’s era Youtube spirals that became my early poetic education. His image convinced me that poetry in general and performance poetry in particular had space for me. I am endlessly baffled and excited to now consider them a friend and colleague. Nathan also uses their considerable lyricism and their mother’s presence in “Beginnings.” As in Jes’ poem, I was struck by the way in which what readers might see as figurative or perhaps “surreal” language is actually very literal to the poet’s experience. The images merely often seem figurative because they are not a literalized part of the reader’s experience and, as readers, we need to be aware of that. The horse, horseshoe, covering of mirrors, asking of cards are as literal as the GED. The fear inside Nathan’s lines, “She was afraid that if breath from her mouth too big, was blown into/ My mouth so small, her breath would blow my life into the sky” might be elevated or mythologized or it might be the very exact way the story of Nathan’s birth was handed to them. As a premie myself who is also engaged with the telling and retelling of my birth in my family and is now trying to write my sort of creation myth in poetry, I found this poem as resonant as a sonic boom as well as deeply crucial as an exercise for a disabled poet. For many of us, the circumstances of our birth are the circumstances of our bodies. I think creating a birth story, especially of such fear and longing as Nathan renders, can be a talisman for existing in a world where there are people and systems that don’t wish us to exist. Nathan deftly moves through some of the examples from their own life to create a volta in the poem, where he also illustrates their reality. “This is not a metaphor for whatever comes after: the boys in the cornfield/After school, or the aide sitting me on the toilet seat so rough it bruised my tailbone,/Or the voices in my head that try to break me, over and over again [...]” The obstacles of other people’s actions against our personhood can create the question in ourselves of why we should exist at all. I believe this to be compounded by Western capitalism’s messaging that does not amplify existence and inherent worth of life for its own sake, which makes the ending of this poem surprising and layered. The story of his coming into existence provides Nathan with an antidote. He creates his own genesis in both the general and biblical sense. I believe this is an exercise all poets might take in hand. I see this poem and Jes’ as opportunities to explore how we might write our self creations and what methods we might employ.
I decided to use Nathan’s reference to “the voices in my head that try to break me” to form a bridge to Alice Paige’s (she/her) poem “Bioluminescence.” Nathan engages with the intersection between chronic pain, the effects of ableism, and mental health more prominently in some of his other work. (I was deeply torn between the chosen poem and his poem “Pain Reimagined” after one of my poems, which felt so beautifully resonant to my being part of the disabled poetics lineage and spoke to how the currents move up and down the lines between us. I hope this poem finds a home soon and may be shared.) But I was intrigued by the way in which Alice might move us into the immediacy of pain. I have been engaging in my own life with how difficult it is for me to be present in my body except in pain; how rapidly I become untethered from my sense of self when my higher faculties shut down to respond entirely to my body. Alice moves this series from the past and ancestry as tethers in the present to a present so consumed that the only tether is the attempt to create a rendering of it. There are flashes of the speaker trying to reach for something inside the pain world (I dream of dead friends—blinking lights like eyelashes swept across the iris.) But what the poem posits is that the only way to deal with the experience is finding language to talk about the experience. As Alice puts it, “Violent metaphors are the only way to get at the damned thing. I keep trying to get at the damned thing. I keep trying to get out of the damned thing.” The tension, I think, is that a writer is forced both to try and use language to capture a purely embodied experience and to recapture a moment that has passed with the same feeling of unending that existed in that present. This returns to the thread I found in these poems about undoing a supposed binary between metaphorical and literal language. Alice creates arresting metaphors for her experience while also detailing the difficulty of that process. When she writes, “I am so hungry to be more than this. For the sky to be the sky,” I recognize that not as metaphor or heightened language but as a truth. I wanted to feature Alice as one of my teachers because, last month, I was a part of her genius class about queer horror. Through her teachings, I started to make sense of how much of my normal, lived, sick experience could be considered the imagery of horror for those outside it. While horror and monstrosity are often metaphorical constructions for experiences, I found myself stripping my metaphors away. I think this poem show’s Alice’s talent, like Nathan and Jessica, for weaving the figurative with the unvarnished truth. Or at least grappling with finding it. Where Jessica and Nathan are writing about people to tether them in times when they need to ground themselves, Alice is reaching for the act of writing itself. This is also made visual in the space of the poem with her choice to flip the poem upside down to represent depression. She is seeking a representation of her experience both visually and linguistically.
I was very excited to juxtapose Alice and E.J. Schoenborn (they/them), who closes out the series by reaching into an imagined future for their tether in “Preservation.” EJ and Alice, along with poets like Ilyus Evander and torrin a greathouse, form one of those great literary friendships whose letters would be discovered in a bygone century, but I get to enjoy on social media in this one. I hope in our future they are given a movement name and literary analysis is written about their bodies of work. I am so privileged to be in their audience. Though the overt horror themes both EJ and Alice delight in were not present in the work each of them submitted, I always think of their voices as being in conversation with each other. All the work EJ presented for consideration in this series dealt with how they find fulfillment amidst the struggles of illness and violence from systems of power. But “Preservation” does a similar kind of self mythologizing as Jessica and Nathan, but reaching forward rather than backward towards blood family. “ I believe the capacity for an imagined future is one of the most powerful tools queer, disabled people have in our arsenal. We are not encouraged to see ourselves with cultural futures. EJ imagines themself as simultaneously an ancestor and an artifact in the wake of environmental catastrophe. They create new generations to take in their life’s work: “tell me their names/and I will ash/with so much joy.” I don’t think it is paradoxical that EJ invokes their own demise while simultaneously building a future world. Nor do I think it a whisper of the genre conventions they often utilize. Here is the lived truth that others might think of as merely an exercise in poetic conceit. For the sick, disabled, queer, for many marginalized people, death is far more literalized. As Jessica does for her mother, EJ uses this poem’s space to see death as a part of the continuation of life.
Liv Mammone
Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island, New York. Her poetry has appeared in wordgathering, monstering, Wicked Banshee, The Medical Journal of Australia, and others. In 2017, she competed for Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York national poetry slam team She was also a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in 2017. She has edited multiple books across genre including the Margins and Murmerations novels by trans activist, Otter Lieffe, and the poetry collection, They Called Her Goddess We Named her Girl by Uma Dwivedi, which was nominated for a Write Bloody Book Award. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia fellow, she works currently as an editor at Game Over Books.
You can find her on Facebook and Instagram.
Image description: Liv Mammone is a white, queer person with shaved, brown hair, purple bangs, thick, black glasses, and a prominent nose. She is looking sidelong at the camera smiling against a black backdrop. The collar of her winter coat can be seen.