Jan. 24, 2022
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Meeting Anne Sexton
By Airea D. Matthews
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Meeting Anne Sexton
by Airea D. Matthews
If you’re lucky the constant mask will get you this:
one stalwart lover who fills out your paperwork when you can’t
remember your name, a beige room with one 6-foot table, a chorus
of moans and whistles from the girl next door who smiles misery
for 5 hours, adults arguing over who kicked in the most walls, an alien
who sucks her thumb to still her hands and avoids humans because
of their nervous eyes, the manchild who writes his name in all caps
on the top of a perpetually empty Styrofoam cup, a jaundiced new mother
who lifts her shirt to play drums on her stretch-marked belly —
she knows only one song, AC/DC’s “For Those About To Rock” — ,
an elderly brother from the deep South who speaks Gullah — but not
to you, about you to everyone else — “uh tell'er say dat gal geechee,”
a chain-smoking, Jesus-freak therapist with questionable credentials
who believes salvation is the cure for every ailment known to man
— including bat-shit crazy —
and the suburban pill popping housewife who needs to know
if she can touch my hair — are they braids or weave? — and
if I can do her hair — I wish I had kinks too!— and if
we can be best friends forever after this tornadic hell is behind
the both of us. We huddle daily around the 6-foot table and commit
to staging elaborate rebellions, deploying pharmico allies to flank
the shadows of old wounds. I am silent, or numb.
I know how I got here, and yet
I have no idea how I got here.
The sole respite offered by a nurse-raven, who pulls me from
that wreckage for routine vital checks. Her name is Anne Sexton.
I told Anne a famous poet had her name, but was no longer
alive — death by asphyxiation, suicide. Anne Sexton promises
she’ll read Anne Sexton one day, then asks how I’m doing.
Never been better, Anne. Never better.
Previously published in Simulacra (Yale University Press, 2017)
Airea D. Matthews. Photo Credit: Ryan Collerd
Airea D. Matthews’ (she/her) first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she directs the poetry program.
Image description: A headshot of a caramel-complected black woman poet with shoulder-length locs that are light and golden brown. She is wearing an off-the shoulder orange and rust-colored shirt with hues of green. The background includes a library of rare books in a wood-paneled room at Bryn Mawr College.