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KAMA SUTRA: CLASSIC LOVEMAKING TECHNIQUES REINTERPRETED FOR TODAY’S LOVERS BY ANNE HOOPER
¢50
Don’t be afraid to educate the Dionysian in you,
in your lover. We all have a lot to learn
about pleasure. “How to enjoy it”
should be near the top of this list.
“How to give it” should be up there too.
Think of watching a breeze move through
a flowering dogwood on a bright, hot day.
Think of pouring a bath with huge, shiny bubbles.
Don’t worry about the missing pages.
Instructions are mostly easy to follow.
Believe it or not, you can reach beyond
the skin of your fingertips. You can imagine
being a songbird flying from tree to tree.
Think of this book as a fake book.
Get a candle and a ukulele. Pretend
love has never been made quite right before.
TABLE TOP TILE SAW
$10
Was it 2Pac who said
“Every beautiful thing
contains some kinda pain?”
Maybe it was Red from
that prison-break movie.
A luxury automobile ad?
Truth is: could’ve been
Ms. Colquitt across the street.
She’s a Reiki Master and
says it’s good to get all
out of whack, no joke. Says,
it’s a fool’s dream to hope
for never-ending harmony.
Elsewise, she adds, no feeling
what harmony feels like. So
back to this table top tile saw.
It could contain the next
great je ne sais quoi,
Ms. Colquitt might say,
you just never know. And
that’s the truth, Ruth! Mister
Señor Love Daddy says that.
HALF A GLOBE (THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE)
Free
To spare you the long sad
story explaining what
now seems like complete nonsense,
here’s the short version:
a do-it-yourself fuck-up.
Without a doubt, it could still be—
with much love and patience,
some nerve and imagination—
it could be something yet,
like a salad bowl or the new shade
for a pendant light hanging above
a dreamy kitchen island.
Of course, it’d be wonderful to have
the Southern Hemisphere back.
The equator not so jagged.
The two huge cracks mended.
And to undo the hole
drilled near the North Pole.
You just don’t fuck with magic.
That was the lesson forgotten here.
Forgotten ahead of time.
Forgotten many times.
Just don’t fuck with magic.
On the Other Side of the Door
A punch, kick, and a smack to the face
These are just a few of the acts my mind can’t erase
Taking my phone so I couldn’t call for help
Choking me so hard, barely able to let out a yelp
Locking me in the room away from my kid
These are just some of the treacherous things that you did
Taking the keys to my car while I slept so you could joyride
In it your secret rendezvous and crack habits you would hide
Having me cower on bended knee under your fist
Holding too tight of a grip on my left and right wrist
Hearing my kid call for mommy from the other side of the door
Not knowing that I’m bleeding out on the living room floor
Black eyes and neck impressions from the same hands I used to love
The next time I see them each will be encased with a glove
To leave no evidence this time—the crime never took place
No matter how many tears you saw streaming down my face
No matter how many times my kid screamed Daddy, no!!
No matter how many times you heard the word stop, and continued to go
Left for Dead
How did I end up here?
Especially at this late hour of the night
Waking up in a damp dark alley, with not a soul in sight
My clothes have been rearranged; my pants button undone
Have I been raped by this son of a gun?
Did someone slip me a mickey?
I remember having drinks, I reach up to feel a hickey
I am about to vomit right here where I sit
My body is in so much pain, much like I’ve been bit
By a venomous snake that has spewed me all over
Now a lost dog wanders by, think I will call him Rover
He approaches me slowly, after he heard my cry
Then proceeds to lick my face, ensuring it’s dry
What the fuck really went on here?
Why was I left alone in the dark, trampled in fear
And why is one of my brown boots missin’
And what is that smell, that resembles someone pissin’
I hear an ambulance on the next street
Maybe I can reach it if I beat my feet
I try to stand but my legs fail to comply
Just what has been done to me, where, and why?
I’m starting to feel dizzy, everything around me is spinnin’
I feel like a loser, not somebody who’s winnin’
I must have placed myself around company that meant me harm
As I reach around to examine my body there’s duct tape on my arm
I need help, someone please call 911
…
He chose, this time, to spare me; death would not be the sum
The days of me hanging with strangers are done, a loner I have now become
The Double Cross
I finally made the long overdue call
To my first rapist, the pedophile of them all
The one who shapeshifted my very life
And since that day I don’t trust, and have been livin’ in strife
Not knowing if you are a friend or foe
So on trees I decided it would be wise to blow
To help me escape from these dark memories
Of how he penetrated me while on his knees
He was way too big for lil’ old me
I was only five; he had eyes but still couldn’t see
They must have been in the closed position
He did things to me I’m too ashamed to mention
He sat me on his lap and we’d play pattycake
I thought it was innocent, had no idea he’d make
Me lie down, legs in the air while I’m on my back
I was the prey and he chose to attack
No one so small should have to endure
Did my mom set me up? I was not sure
Cuz she would come home and find us in the room
My body language should have alerted her, I know it said DOOM
But see, we were never connected in that way
She put dick and drugs before me since the first day
I was never her prize nor her priority
Always seen as the black sheep, always the minority
All I wanted was for her to come in and protect
Not beat on me and place a chokehold around my neck
Saying, “you want my man, bitch, you did this on purpose”
But I was an innocent child, undergoing this metamorphosis
I can’t take this pain—I was betrayed by my mother
She looked at me as the other woman, never special, just another
***
Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler
***
ENOUGH is a Rumpus original series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women, trans, and nonbinary people who engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We believe that while this subject matter is especially timely now, it is also timeless. We want to make sure that this conversation doesn’t stop—not until our laws and societal norms reflect real change.
Many names appearing in these stories have been changed.
Visit the archives here.
Balladeer Quatrains
This slant-ass love song is for six storeys
of cement and light and how it held every portable
us blanket-swaddled against scattering. This is
for the width of its spaces, slope of its ramps, the promise
of a place to just stop for a while in a world full
of go go go. This is for the friends on the roof as the fire-
works flew. This is for letting us wait out the down-
pours. This is for the music and the time to hear
it—Murder by Death cello pulled taught across
my days. Even in later works, Turla’s voice brings
me back (she’s a roving ghost) here. This is for all
the heys and good mornings I got to say and mean
and for the people who cannot hear them anymore
ever. This is for the weird shrimpy scent of callery pear
that marked spring in your air. But mostly, this is for the songs
you taught me to write, the curios. I’m sorry this one took so long.
By Heart
You are all chorus and no verse—catchy
and repetitive—just a few words and a rhyme.
The rabbi next door used to call you
Rice. No one knew why. Sometimes he would
mumble it like a curse, others he’d blow
it like a kiss. It was the way your head dangled
just off the pillow that told me you were
going. You had no bags to pack, no good-
byes to say. The others wondered after you
in duct tape and crayon, but never really
looked. We were more conjecture than action
then. The rabbi looked up every time the door
opened. I like to think he was waiting for you,
missed your hook, your melody. I have no
evidence. One day, he too was the crumbs
memory makes in the hall. I find myself
humming you sometimes. It is not a longing
but an echo of a longing—a tune to pass
the time.
***
Author photo courtesy of author
Our April 2023 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection is Katie Farris‘s, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. Read an excerpt below and subscribe by March 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast.
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.
The body bald
cancerous but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—
This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
***
“Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World” (poem) from Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris, Alice James Books, 2023
Since the appearance of her debut collection in 2006, Ada Limón has made herself a consistent presence in the small yet voluminous world of American poetry. Releasing a new book every three to five years, each of which has been met with increasing critical acclaim, the newly appointed Poet Laureate now occupies the tricky position of an artist on a hot streak, for whom continued success is expected as a matter of course. Into this atmosphere of eager anticipation comes The Hurting Kind, her sixth collection and a confident follow-up to 2018’s award-winning The Carrying. Fans of Limón’s previous work won’t be disappointed by the new, which adeptly lives up to the high standards set by its predecessors; the collection brims with the kind of highly polished, emotionally resonant, and musically dynamic poems characteristic of their creator, who seems to have developed her creative process into something like a personal science. The upshot of such rigorous craftsmanship is a certain dependability on the part of Limón’s poems, an assurance that each one will have something valuable to offer, whether that be a potent image or a delectable turn of phrase or a particularly impactful catharsis. Inherent to this dependability, though, is the risk of becoming so entrenched in a given style that the poems, for all their ability to awe and spark epiphany, themselves become formulaic. It’s this risk that haunts The Hurting Kind from start to finish, even if Limón’s writing is often dazzling and deliberative enough to obscure it.
The commitment throughout her recent volumes to a specific poetic style is complemented by Limón’s equally steadfast commitment to a handful of subjects as universal as they are inexhaustible: memory, grief, love, nature. Typically, these strands are interwoven in ways that both reinforce and complicate one another, resulting in taut, melodious mosaics that, in the most successful cases, give one the impression of having discovered something urgently beautiful about existence, or at least about Limón’s. The currents of her personal life provide the premises for most of the poems, with narrative elements from previous collections reappearing in updated form: a cat formerly owned by the ex of the speaker’s husband and adopted by the couple upon her passing (documented in The Carrying’s “After His Ex Died”) leads Limón into an oblique meditation on death, memory, and affection in the early poem “Glimpse,” while animals more generally continue to function as favored Muses. Horses in particular elicit powerful responses from the poet, as in “Intimacy,” where a memory of the speaker’s mother tending horses culminates in a recognition of “a clean honesty / about our otherness that feels / not like the moral but the story,” and in “Foaling Season,” where she connects “a sea // of foals, mare and foal, mare and foal” standing “[i]n the dew-saturated foot-high blades / of grass“ to her own foiled desire for motherhood. Elsewhere, focus lands on the varieties of birds and trees also found in the rural Kentucky hills that Limón has now called home for several years, along with those from her cherished California past. The insights mined from such encounters are wide-ranging—some, like that regarding the entwined cypress trees central to “It Begins With the Trees,” are about love, and others, like that belonging to “The Magnificent Frigatebird,” concern the ever-important act of naming. But no matter the differences in their subject matter, the poems of The Hurting Kind are all linked by an immense and undiscriminating tenderness, the bestowal of which once again proves to be Limón’s great strength.
Though in her past work this tenderness has manifested most frequently as an ultra-perceptive rumination on the natural world that rivals even Mary Oliver, here we find Limón taking a more overtly ethical posture. “Is this where I am supposed to apologize?” the speaker asks in “The First Fish,” having recalled how, as a girl, she “pulled that great fish up out of Lake Skinner’s / mirrored-double surface” and killed it at the behest of “the old tree of a man” accompanying her. Shame ripples palpably through these lines, especially those that follow, which widen the poem’s purview “[n]ot / only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me / but for the generations of plunder and vanish.” Humanity’s capacity for inflicting hurt on nature emerges as a focal point of the collection, as does the dereliction of responsibility this hurt implies. Consider another reflection on casual childhood violence found in “Cyrus & the Snakes,” where a young speaker and her brother crack open an egg they’ve stolen from their family’s chicken coop. The poet renders the event in her by-now familiar couplets:
[…] Where weexpected yolk and mucus was an unfeathered
and unfurled sweetness. We stared at the thing,dead now and unshelled by curiosity and terrible youth.
My brother pretended not to care so much,while I cried, but only a little. […]
By poem’s end, her grown brother has renounced his childishly aloof facade, instead desiring “all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered,” a shift that highlights the abiding possibility of redemption in our fallen world. Still, it too often remains a possibility unfulfilled, as represented by the venerable mulberry tree of “Power Lines,” whose destruction at the hands of municipal workers leaves “just a ground-down stump / where what felt like wisdom once was.” In a masterful display of Limón’s instinct for sequencing her poems, we further appreciate the weight of this loss in the immediately subsequent “Hooky,” an ode to carefree college days that soon becomes a celebration of “[t]he true and serious beauty / of trees, how it seemed insane that they should / offer this to us . . . .” Taken together, these and other instances present a vision of ethical engagement with our environment rooted not in diminishment of the human, but in reverent elevation of the non-human.
Crucial to any vision of this sort is a method for bridging the illusory divide between the non-human and the human, a way of making the non-human legible to the human, so that the respect and compassion necessary for the survival of both can be extended from the latter to the former. The method Limón has adopted—punctilious use of the proper names for each and every organism she includes in her poems—is not a new one, having been employed in her previous volumes and almost certainly by other poets. But in The Hurting Kind her efforts assume a new centrality, as the urgency of the threat posed by the climate crisis to human and non-human alike only grows with time. As useful as her method is for the non-human, however, its limits are revealed by her attempts to render comprehensible the inscrutable vastness of the human. “You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving,” Limón writes in the collection’s titular poem, an existential grappling with the death of the speaker’s beloved grandfather. “She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.” Here in the realm of the human, there are things like lives and selves that remain forever inexpressible through words, the usage of which always carries the risk of misrepresenting the subject. Implicit in this formulation is the role of the watcher, separate and distinct from the watched. Limón dwells on the objectifying quality of the interpersonal with a determination that makes it another central theme of The Hurting Kind. The near-worst-case scenario is explored at the start of “How We See Each Other,” when she recounts the following disturbing incident.
I forget I am a woman walking alone and wave
at a maroon car, assuming it’s a neighbor or a friend.The car then circles the block and goes past me five times.
One wave and five times the car circles. Strangers.
Counterposed against this injurious gaze is that with which Limón ends the poem, “the solid gaze of a woman who has witnessed me as unassailable, / the clarity of her vision so clean I feel almost free.” The evolution of the other’s gaze from maliciously constrictive to borderline liberatory demonstrates both the raw power vested in it and the responsibility that it demands of its wielder. Limón alludes to as much in the wonderfully disjunctive “Sanctuary”:
[…] The great eyeof the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.
The full complexity of interpersonal relations is here condensed into just a handful of lines, and it’s a testament to Limón’s ability as a poet that we can also recognize in them the many valences left unwritten. Whether she’s considering the human or the non-human, her ethical values are consistently generative of a poetry whose vigor and music make it more than the sum of its parts.
That achievement is primarily owing to the content of Limon’s poems, rather than their forms. Like its predecessors, to read The Hurting Kind is to cycle through a series of the same four or five formal templates, which, despite each poem’s unmistakable singularity on the levels of meaning, emotion, and sound, comes to impose something dangerously similar to monotony on not just this collection, but on the past decade of Limón’s poetic output. Opening her three most recent volumes at random, the reader is most likely to find a poem consisting of a single unbroken stanza, ten to forty-odd lines in length, with each line ranging from eight to sixteen amorphously rhythmic syllables. Or they might find one in couplets, or even tercets, the lines indented to give a sense of movement, maybe a few one-line stanzas interspersed throughout for variety. Other less common formats include a paragraph of prose and a type of poem written in short, highly enjambed lines. The majority of The Hurting Kind’s entries fall into one of these categories, excepting certain laudable outliers like “Where the Circles Overlap” and “The Hurting Kind,” though even these more irregular cases tend to cohere into stanzas of two to three lines. None of this necessarily detracts from the collection’s overall caliber—Limón is clearly invested in these forms, and they offer sturdy, dependable structures for the contemplative reveries at which she excels. But after reading what appears, at a glance, to be the same poem for the twelfth time, one might be forgiven for having trouble distinguishing one from the other in their memory. Stretch this out over at least three volumes, and the suspicion of artistic stagnation seems not unreasonable. Limón’s gift for spinning dynamism out of her subjects keeps that danger always at bay, but her lack of experimentation in the formal dimension leaves uncultivated an entire axis of poetic potential. A stylistic evolution that incorporates her existing virtues will be the challenge of her next collection.
Excitement for such a follow-up promises to be great, given the predominant success of The Hurting Kind in continuing Limón’s hot streak. The poems in it tread familiar ground, yet they do so with a keener, more consciously ethical attitude than her earlier work, the payoff of decades spent fashioning memory, impression, and nature into the beautiful words appropriate to them. Formal inertia notwithstanding, Limón has once again proven her powers both as an artist and as a witness of our increasingly endangered world, handling her materials with a uniquely palliative tenderness. Combined with her poetry’s characteristic musicality, this more than justifies The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik imploring us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.
***
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s March selection,
SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by Michael Chang
forthcoming from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press on March 15, 2023
HAPPY WARRIOR
she fell off her scooter staring at me, determined as a drillbit
don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink soda, we want lots & lots of pop
write poems in my head how other azns do math
u don’t need my help dazzling co-eds
my mouth pretty for when u come to town
so hot u cook an egg on it
so hot sunglasses come out all warped
so hot u get the chili pepper on ratemyprofessor
my mother knew better than to pretend-leave me someplace
i would’ve said ok peace i’ll let u know either way
discerning as shibboleth, daylight savings can’t buy shit
i hate that most memoirs are abt other ppl
see how they huddle, pretending to be something they’re not … beefsteak tomatoes
unpitying boy im going to love u like sweet corn congee
teach u different ways to say calves like cantaloupes
make u mushroom soup from scratch
caress u furry creature
ditch our umbrellas in a rainstorm, get soaked like last week’s dishes
dog & bone is a lazy name for a restaurant
try: the rooster, reluctant poet, & little halfwit who invented the universe
the same grave, the height of ridiculousness
ur lime jello, im fruit suspended in u
we hear the excited cries, think: he looks good out there
***
Excerpted from SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by Michael Chang. Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Reprinted by permission, courtesy of Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.
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