a poem by alicia rebecca myers

15 Weeks

Winter in Nebraska. Tiny floes skirr the river like translucent

trash. Dark-eyed junco peck the ground. An eagle Andrew says,

and I wonder if she’s ever swooped close enough to see a brass

finial fashioned after her own likeness. Inside, the pressure of

fructifying. I repeatedly wake at 3AM, what Grandma Walker

called the convict hour, when escaped men would break into

your shotgun house to kill you. Hands noiseless as beargrass. I

listen for the pitch of snow on windows. I haven’t gotten past the

fear that you’re not alive. That the town will dredge you from my

muddy body. Catfish barbels for hair. Slugs for ears. Last night

I stumbled in the dim, ate toast by glow of the humidifier. The

birders share their binoculars. Geoff tells us after years of marriage

he’s come to recognize his wife by sound alone: the rhythm 

of their broom on linoleum or her breath, seconds before a pit

hits the sink. A mute woodpecker rams his head, a moshing rocker

with red plumage. His retina protected by a second eyelid. I’m

carrying spares, like Cami who buys two of everything she loves.

Once at a party she wore the same watch on separate wrists. 

They told discrepant times. I want you to know the difference in

music made by my walking with my head up and my head down.

I click my tongue to transmit something vatic. I speak your name

over and over directly to the center, your hollowest bone.

"15 Weeks" first appeared in The Carolina Quarterly.




Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist living in upstate NY. Most recently, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Carolina Quarterly, Cream City Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Day One, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia (Texas A&M). In February of 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. Her chapbook Greener was released in 2009 from Finishing Line Press, and she holds an MFA from NYU. She is at work on her first full length manuscript, Canary Be Attendant.

a poem by alicia rebecca myers

The Untelling


I was a well and then I wasn’t.
I shook a rainstick. It turned out to be a telescope.
I put it to my eye anyway, grew accustomed to distance.
A client writes to say he needs to go to Gnats, France.
You mean Nantes?  I reply.
This uptick in luck was really just a fluke.
We’re looking at what once was and where it once was.
That blithe star, whose light of death has reached us.
I must have said this time a dozen different times, just to take it back.
My barista asked why the sudden switch to decaf.
You ask if blue can be a naturally occurring color.
Maybe in stones, I say.
I lied when I told you that I didn’t hide the egg timer.
The recipe called for jujube, not plum.
Summarily, my belly knew.




"The Untelling" first appeared in jubilat

Alicia Rebecca Myers received her MA in English from UGA in 2001 and her MFA in Poetry from NYU in 2007, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Most recently, her work has appeared in Cream City Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia (Texas A&M), and jubilat. In March of this year, she was awarded a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. Her chapbook Greener was released in 2009 from Finishing Line Press. Rebecca lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is at work on her first full length manuscript and a son due in August.

a poem by alicia rebecca myers

Inside the Grotesquery, a Fantasmic Neglect


A little girl screams behind the castle.
Shhh a cricket hears
with its front legs. Once upon a time
everything above the sky
was water. Maybe in the bibbidi
kind was kinder. I'm storybooking
in threes, aren't you? I sell this
for a living. I called the preferred agent line
and got Perdita. No cigarette butts
in the parks like a million dead
stellar cores. I weld this
for the giving. The smell of citrus
wafts like noblesse oblige back to a simpler,
rounder time. Do not resuscitate.
Either Eeyore, or the illusion.
Sorcerer Mickey can control the stars and comets.
Mickey can't.
We have this grief
in common.
A grandma shouldn't squeeze
into a trundle but
she'll try, she'll try.
People are cheap
and terrible. I've been known to exclaim
"Royal Table is the most important meal of all!"
If you wear your own costume please refrain
from signing autographs. Leave that to the real.
The summer I turned 19 I pulled order
tickets from a printer, served mouse-shaped
pizzas, wore purple polyester. Mark
in Maintenance asked to meet me
at the Polynesian. I'd only ever kissed.
I waited in a hammock.
The stars unlatched,
one by one. I've been offered
the survey hundreds of times. I'm afraid
I'm still on hold. Take back
this tiara. I want to be
Pizarro, dreaming
of Peru before he found it.





Rebecca's chapbook of poems, Greener, was released from Finishing Line Press in 2009. Recently, she has four poems in Cream City Review, and a poem in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia. She is currently at work on a collection of non-fiction essays called "From Soho to Silo" about, among other things, life as a travel consultant and her attempt to contact an incarcerated North Georgia murderer who shares her name. She blogs at FromSohotoSilo.blogspot.com and lives in Athens with her husband and tuxedo cat Snickers.

les misogyny: a post by alicia rebecca myers

In a Culture Desk post on the New Yorker website, David Denby panned the movie version of Les Mis for, among other things, its sentimental pandering and lack of dancing. He also made the following observation about the fragile mind-set of tween girls:

Every emotion in the movie is elemental. There’s no normal range, no offhand or incidental moments—it’s all injustice, love, heartbreak, cruelty, self-sacrifice, nobility, baseness. Which brings us to heart of the material’s appeal. As everyone knows, the stage show was a killer for girls between the ages of eight and about fourteen. If they have seen “Les Mis” and responded to it as young women, they remain loyal to the show—and to the emotions it evoked—forever. At that age, the sense of victimization is very strong, and “Les Mis” is all about victimization. 

I first discovered Les Mis from my friend and musical theater dealer Elizabeth. Sophomore year of high school, she left a copy of the 1987 Original Broadway Recording in my locker. The tapes contained occasional interludes in which Elizabeth, talking into a clunky Media Center recorder, commented on everything from the lasting union of our friendship to our English teacher's bald spot. "We could sell advertising space on it!" she'd boomed, a segue into "Little People." I loved the music immediately. I found it spellbindingly melodic. My listening enjoyment relied very little on rooting the action in historical accuracy. It was years before I discovered Marius wasn't fighting in the French Revolution (remember, no internet). In a weird academic irony, Elizabeth and I refashioned Eponine's love dirge into "A Little Fall of Reign of Terror" and aced our European History final.

Shows like "Glee" now champion the artistically driven but socially maladroit, but in 1994, no one thought it quirky-cute to spend your lunch break on campus hand-painting the Phantom's mask. I wasn't invited to weekend parties involving alcohol or a boy picking me up in an open-air jeep. My goyishe portrayal of Golde in Fiddler on the Roof didn't earn me a spot on Homecoming Court. I was a proud card-carrying member of the Colm Wilkinson fan club (I had mailed in $5 and received an actual card with his face on it), but only a handful of people -- my choir teacher excluded -- appreciated this level of devotion. When the touring production of Cats came to Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, Elizabeth and I celebrated by wearing tabby ears to class. Like most high school girls -- even those who were popular -- I lived with the perpetual solipsistic sense that I was on the receiving end of cosmic injustice.

And yet despite my wretched martyrdom, Les Mis was never about my victimization. I had just gotten my learner's permit, my first real autonomy, when Elizabeth gave me those tapes. My mother was in the hospital with pre-cancerous colon polyps. I became proficient at the same stretch of road -- soft left onto Pinecrest, hard right just before the shopping center's pasteboard dinosaur sculpture -- listening to a sentimental soundtrack that kept me from capitulating into self-pity. I practiced red-light turns and lane changes to the bravura of rebel voices. I belted histrionics to realize my own capacity to feel, to move freely between two equally unwieldy world views: life as a curse from God, life as a gift from God. The music, taken as a whole, was like the line of backstroke flags strung above the school's pool. It stopped me from hitting a wall.

Elizabeth had run out of space on the second tape; it cut off right as Cosette was entreating her father to live, right as Colm Wilkinson was quivering, "Yes Cosette/forbid me now to die/I'll obey/I will try." The outcome was obvious, although without track names, I didn't yet know this blithe exchange was entitled "Jean Valjean's Death Song." I retained agency. I spent those two weeks driving to and from the hospital in fear and anger, but fully galvanized, my nerves tethered to something electric. In Company, Sondheim calls this alert vulnerability "Being Alive":

Somebody, hold me too close,
Somebody, hurt me too deep,
Somebody, sit in my chair
And ruin my sleep
And make me aware
Of being alive.

My mother, it turned out, would be fine.

I saw Hooper's Les Mis in New York a few days after Christmas. As cliche as it sounds, it was raining. I smiled at a high school-aged girl, hair tucked into an Eponine-ish pageboy cap, waiting in the lobby for her friends. She was running scales. I was with my husband's family. We stood around awkwardly, the awkwardness that comes from knowing you will soon be crying jagged cries together in profile. Despite my deepening affection for the show, I'd never actually attended a performance. Sloshed at karaoke, I'm the first to turn in a slip for "I Dreamed a Dream," the first to sigh into the mike with annoyance when Fantine's recitative is cut.  I can wax obnoxious on Phillip Quest's baritonal color, or hum "I Saw Him Once," Cosette's touching lead-in to "In My Life" that was scrapped when the show moved from the West End to Broadway. I know Les Mis. But I had squirreled it away all these years, cherished it in a hope chest where I could never be disappointed. Or maybe this has nothing to do with disappointment. Maybe this is really about imaginative joy, how it feels to luxuriate in possibility. You see, Les Mis, for me, has always been about possibility.

A lot has been made of the dreariness of the show: how the women especially are whiny, that their whiny dreariness is even more oppressive on film. Les Mis is not the go-to show for a rollicking good time. As my husband put it, "They don't call it Les Happy." But the bleakest, most heart-wrenching ballads, the ones that make your throat convulse like you've swallowed Peeps dipped in shoe-polish, are sung as soliloquies. I take them as intensely personal moments of private introspection. They're the necessary pre-work all of us do in order to move forward. Anyone who's ever been in unrequited love can surely attest to becoming a temporary shut-in and indulging in self-pity: "A world that's full of happiness/that I have never known." Pass the bourbon. I've sung this tune a hundred times in therapy. The real audience is the self.

What became clear to me in watching Les Mis in a medium that allows for extreme close-ups is just how strong the characters --women included -- really are. There's an exquisite tension between what is sung privately on parapets ("lonely soul") and what course of action is pursued publicly ("higher goal") at the barricades and docks. Listening to Elizabeth's tapes back in high school, I sensed, but couldn't yet articulate, that vulnerability isn't the same as victimization. Eponine might wallow in the rain, but she also chooses the difficult, ethical high-road in both screaming to warn Cosette of danger and handing over the love letter to Marius. Valjean slips away to plead with God to spare Marius in battle, but never identifies himself as Cosette's father or interferes in his future son-in-law's honorable plan to fight. Characters wrestle with decision-making in the dirty shadows but step forth assuredly into the light. That isn't to say that their decisions are flawless. Fantine goes from factory worker to prostitute awfully fast, and you have to wonder if there might not be another way, less all or nothing, perhaps as a village burlesque or pantomime performer first?  But her determination to provide for her daughter is unwavering. Joan Didion, in her essay "On Self-Respect," writes that "People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things... [they] exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve." This moral nerve is an imperative in Les Mis. Everyone is aware of the price they must pay. They pay dearly, but not blindly.

There's real danger in disparaging sentimentality, in gendering tears. It's true that I cry a little every day. I'm not depressed, or emotionally unstable, or, perhaps worst of all, self-righteous. (I could probably eat veal in a calf hutch.) I'm moved by what isn't empirical: time travel, Ouija spirits, color theory, virtue. I'm moved by fidelity: Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye Terrier who mourned the death of his owner for fourteen years by laying on his grave in Greyfriars Churchyard. And despite a wooden Russell Crowe sounding like he's ordering brunch and timidly asking for substitutions that aren't allowed, I was moved by Les Mis. I was a blessed fifteen again -- impassioned, resilient, awkward, timid, involved, harrowed, a force with which to be reckoned.

There’s no normal range, no offhand or incidental moments—it’s all injustice, love, heartbreak, cruelty, self-sacrifice, nobility, baseness. What else, if not this, is the pith of life?


-Alicia Rebecca Myers

a poem by alicia rebecca myers

Alas, his fears are well founded.
There is thunder and lightning in the sky.
-Vivaldi, The Four Seasons


At St. Bartholomew's After a Breast Biopsy


The longest day -- Summer Solstice -- daylight
bides. I learn that dusk will wane
sometime during the Second Movement.
Adagio in Fall, then darkness.
I am twenty-nine.

In the mural above the nave
Christ lifts his arms to an invisible
practitioner. He's suspended
in a weatherless sky. And that grey dove,
is she coming or going?

I think of the story of you
painting a comedian's apartment high
on cocaine, how you confused colors,
reversed walls and ceiling.
I didn't know you then.
I only know the sober god who kisses
my nipples each morning before walking dogs
for a living: a change, a benediction.



Originally published in Greener


Alicia Rebecca Myers's chapbook of poems, Greener, was released from Finishing Line Press in 2009. She has four poems in the current issue of Cream City Review, and a poem forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia. She is the Co-Editor of the online literary journal Clementine, and blogs about being a travel consultant and a poet at www.beccamyers.com.

the real social network

Interesting how so many of them resemble each other.

Not surprisingly, the film debuted at #1 at the box office. Maybe one of the best movies to do so in a while?

No, the internet doesn't kill all professions. Becca hashes out the differences between a travel agent and a travel consultant.

James Franco is so hot. Watch him and The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham discuss writing and other things. I'm reading Cunningham's new novel By Nightfall and enjoying it.

pretty in pink

Rachel Bilson at Christian Dior in Paris. Love her style.

The recent sad wave of gay youth suicides on Towleroad and on Out.com.

Loving Bagpoor's fall issue. Featuring my preview of the film Black Swan.

Becca's blog is back!

Amanda loves Halloween.

A nice defense of the very gifted poet Elizabeth Alexander on The Rumpus.

Matthew Hittinger remembers John Stahle.

outside of the circle

I feel that it is necessary to respond to Anis Shivani's article, The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Writers on the Huffington Post. Huffington Post is a powerful political entity which recently added a section for Books: a fledging form of entertainment in our country. Some agree with Shivani's choices. Some, as indicated in the comments below the post, hadn't heard of or read many of these authors (which makes me question whether they should be deemed "overrated" at all). Literary Facebook friends have responded with equal amounts of solidarity and disdain.

As a writer and admirer of many of those skewered here, I was interested to see his arguments. Instead I found myself flinching at his brash insensitivity. I could defend some of the good in everyone of these writers, something that Shivani eschews--to which I call "bad criticism." There's a muddled pettiness and laziness to his attacking.

He writes of The Hours: "Another devotee of the antihumanist message, which comes packaged as resignation to reality--in other times, such an attitude was called fatalism." So according to Shivani, to be a "good writer" one shouldn't explore fatalism? Based on his assessments, not only do I think Shivani misread The Hours, but he doesn't take in account Cunningham's other works (A Home at the End of the World is a fantastic read; Specimen Days, less so, though full of interesting ideas).

Of Jhumpa Lahiri, a tremendously gifted and subtle storyteller, Shivani dictates what he thinks she should not write about: "Utterly unwilling (though probably fully capable, since she's the only readable writer on this list) to write about anything other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge's Central and Inman Squares, and making easy adjustments to the top of the American meritocratic pyramid." I would disagree that the adjustments her characters make are "easy." Did he read and fully comprehend the exile and heartbreak in "Mrs. Sen's" or The Namesake?

He writes of Ashberry as a mixer of "low and high levels of language, low and high culture, every available postmodern artifact and text, from media jargon to comic books, to recreate a reality ordered only by language itself." Ashberry isn't a poet I always connect with necessarily but I don't see what's wrong with the criticisms Shivani lays out here.

And the critiques on Sharon Olds are quite ludicrous and reek of an innate discomfort with writing by women: "Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up its own hot and bothered cadaver, exposed since the 1970s. Female poets in workshops around the country idolize her, collaborate in the masochism, because they say she freed them to talk about taboo subjects, she "empowered" them."

I disagree with his characteristics of "bad writing": "obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance." As a writer, I should have a better "moral core"--a firmer grasp on the good and the bad. Such a laxness has left me on the on the outside of circles or snarky workshops discerning why something sucks. There is just so much out there, recognized or unrecognized (Shivani claims he will put out an underrated list: a much more worthy, but less-attention-seeking endeavor) to engage with, to explore and to take away from.

The lack of openness on Shivani's part is toxic. There is a personal, interior texture to writing that separates it from any other art form. This pursuit, I believe, should be encouraged more than derided, especially by fellow writers and contemporaries.


-Jeffery Berg



My friend Becca wrote a measured, articulate post in defense of Sharon Olds that I hope everyone reads.

See also Anna North's response on Jezebel

And Charles Jensen, who is so smart.

shoutouts

I love the Brooklyn Museum. Their American High Style exhibition was great to see. I'm still thinking about the 1910 dress above designed by Paul Poiret.

I am so happy that the talented Rebecca Myers and her blog is a finalist to appear in the next issue of Creative Nonfiction. I suggested her entry "Christmas Past" to the editors and alas, out of over 800 submissions, it was one of 19 finalists.

Dan Rosenberg, whose poems were recently featured here, has a new chapbook: A Thread of Hands. Only $8!

A well-written review of George A. Romero's 1977 cult vampire classic Martin from Behind the Couch.

Love these John Woo Star Wars inspired drawings for various menswear lines on Le Chic Batik.

203 east 4th

A poem from my friend Becca. I love this one. Go seek her chapbook Greener (or order greenerchapbook@gmail.com). We co-edit Clementine together and are hoping for a new issue soon.


203 East 4th

I write you from a dense island.
Ships skirt the pratfall shore then grow
distant -- I grow inventive, pray radio
sleeps in the coconut's core. Can
waves refuse what they carry, manage
without baggage? I've lost how to row.
Flat palms vise the hot air, sostenuto.
The same sun that drowns rises, dripping.
Shells protrude like tusks or oars;
I string colors together, rope starlet
necklaces of auger, cuttlebone. Sweat
salts my eyes to tears -- that, and the hours
spent alone. You might forget
me completely. I write you from regret.


-Alicia Rebecca Myers

oh my darling

My friend Rebecca Myers and I co-edit an online journal named Clementine.

Our third issue went live yesterday and we are excited about it. With every issue, it's a pleasure to compile great poetry and photography by up and coming and established artists. One of my favorite poets, David Trinidad, is in the latest issue with two beautiful poems on death. It also features Chris Roberts, Lisa Newhouse, MRB Chelko, Sharanya Manivannan, Rachel Marie Patterson, Kaethe Schwehn, and Andy Stallings.

The gorgeous photography included is by Rick Herron (who took the picture here) and David Wright.

Compiling all of the unique perspectives has been fun and it's exciting to see Clementine blossom. It's also fun to work with Rebecca who is a very talented poet.

Our mission with Clementine are to give a space to poems that tackle or adopt ideas about the persona. Here's one of my favorite poems that Becca wrote from her chapbook Greener. The poem is in the voice of Maria von Trapp.

Maria Von Trapp, on the 25th Anniversary

Re-release of The Sound of Music on Video

They sugared and screened my life, made me

Julie Andrews, finder of comfort in brown

copper kettles, climber of mountains, settler

in unfamiliar territory. I went from hills to curtained

kids, yodeling all the way. Oh there's the whirling

dervish now, the how-do-you-find-a-

word-that-means-the-how-do-you-solve-a-

problem-like-Maria. Say it loud and it's almost

like praying. Maria. Sweet singer, second

mother, former nun turned able-bodied Edelweisser.

Christopher Plummer tired to make surrender

film worthwhile, but how, chin scar

like an either/or? Pick your poison,

your puppeteer. Will it be God or Captain,

abbey bells or seven children screaming?

Favorite things do nothing for fear. I hear

my well-kept songs wanting out, personal

refrains not fit for any festival chorus but voiced

Leisel-like at night, gazebo hidden. I sneak away

for secret ballads, strum chords crisp as abandoned hills,

wonder if when I wandered long,

afternoons by the high stream, through audience-

less and still a nun, I sang better.

I rewind the final scene, watch again and again

as my Julie Andrews legs trudge towards an unseen

inn in Vermont. A family fleeing war,

hands so full of Gretel, who can carry

a guitar?

-Alicia Rebecca Myers

I do hope you enjoy our latest issue!

maine events

Becca talks about being a summer nanny in Maine for a family of geniuses in an insightful post.

clementine issue two

Becca & I are so happy to unveil the second issue of Clementine Magazine today! There are excellent new poems by Kimiko Hahn, Marcus Jackson, Janine Joseph, Lauren Gould, and Erin M. Bertram. David Levine's 1970s photographs are also included.

Please check it out here.


Eve's Right Foot, Oregon Coast, 1977
Photography by David Levine

oh my darling

Rebecca Myers & I are thrilled to be unveiling a new issue of Clementine in July. We have been working hard on gathering the best poems and are very excited about it!

Please check out Issue #1 and stay tuned for Issue #2!

Peace.

rainbow fright

Courtesy of Rebecca Myers's yard sale.

greener

I thought of no better way to kick off National Poetry Month and my first poetry post with a poem from a friend.


Greener

I manage putting you behind me -- save
these head turns. Suddenly fourteen
again, back of the family Ford, final wave
goodbye to the only home I've known. “Green
on the other side,” Dad swears: my first
lesson in the windowed view. I believe
people defy distance. I mistrust
the forward and new of leaving you.

Still, I'm artful. I paint my Sunday park
all picnic, all foreground, with no respect
to the displaced lake. I ignore the dark.
I dot my far-off trees haphazard, stark.

- Alicia Rebecca Myers

Alicia Rebecca Myers received her MFA in Poetry from NYU in 2006, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her chapbook, Greener, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and she has a poem in the current issue of Buffalo Carp. She writes a blog.

To order her chapbook email greenerchapbook@gmail.com