More Roxanna Bennett - Sonnet Crown

[radiantfracture]

This poet continues to transform the flows and tides of language in my brain forever.

Many of the poems in Unmeaningable are part of what I think is a sonnet crown, a series of sonnets in which each poem picks up a line (usually the last) from the poem before and reworks that phrase or idea around the central theme -- in this case, being a human and a queer human body in the medical system, needing care and having to submit to medical regimes of thought, behaviour, bodily and emotional controls, to get that care -- all yet while labouring to maintain a self in the face of both this regime and the speaker's bodily and psychic pain.

The sonnets are very intertextual. These two use lines from V for Vendetta. I want to put them together so that you can see the powerful effect of the chained lines / ideas. (I read them to the poet J and we both were more or less speechless thereafter.)

Shadow Gallery

Chewing through reasons to wait, why remind
disease with flowers. White spines of hyacinths,
secret histories in fossilized fists, diamonds
in dendrites, the art of memory operating
faithfully while we sleep. When I say burned
you think hot ash when I mean stripped skinless,
singed. Visible only when I binge. (gold girls churn
churlish when deprived of polish) O live a little less
and it it cleanses puke it out, rot is
where I stump in grubby fug. Grudge water
portioned in plastic cups, I'm down to the last inch.
"The last inch all that's left. We must never
lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.
For three years, I had roses, and apologized to no one."


Wishes for Strangers

From now on I will have roses and apologize
to no one. "Every last inch of me shall perish,
every last inch except one. Small, fragile"
the only thing in the world I shall cherish
"(This patient performance of subsistence:
How long will we remain dependent
docile to meds manufactured by husbands
sick of wives who voice their pain--)"
I don't know who you are, I do not know
your story. I may never meet you, burn
with you, weep with you, but I hope
that you escape, that the world turns
and your pain does not flee the word pain.
That one day you will have roses again.

I would read them out loud if I were you.

Happy Pride.

{rf}

Comments

[dewline]

Yes.

[sovay]

That one day you will have roses again.

Thank you.

[radiantfracture]

I wish this for you often.

[sabotabby]

Best lines Alan Moore ever came up with.

[writedragon]

Speechless. Have you ever read something so incredible that you felt overwhelmed with the essence of the thing, such that you felt a nearly uncontrollable urge to punch a wall? Not with rage, but with joy and emotion so strongly felt that physical expression might be the only means to find relief? Lisa Moore's novel "Caught" did that to me. These poems come close -- maybe gouge-the-drywall-with-a-fingernail close.

Found your delightful comment on juniperberry's rewatch of due South, followed you here, and have subscribed to your journal. We share a love of language, black sails, doctor who, and a bunch of other stuff not listed in my profile. Hope you don't mind if I stick around for awhile and wallow in your words. As a person, I strive for equanimity, though I have never achieved insouciance. I'm far too passionate and feel far too deeply to be at peace with the ever-whirling world (for what it's worth). ;)

[radiantfracture]

Thank you for the recommendation!

If you like the poems, and you have not yet read Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, you might enjoy that. It is not perfect, but the sequence she is quoting here is beautiful.

(Alternately, you may already know this perfectly well.)

[lokifan]

Gorgeous!

I haven't actually read/seen V for Vendetta but I assume the roses are it? Because of that socialist refrain about bread and roses.

[radiantfracture]

It's been a while since I read the graphic novel, so the details are hazy, but yes, the roses come from there. The song is probably one of the touchpoints for the image. There's a story-within-the-story told as a letter where the speaker, a prisoner, writes about maintaining her sense of self under conditions designed to annihilate her humanity.