Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. Her next book, The Wendys, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty
In her introduction to her novel Sula, Toni Morrison writes, “Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” To be an “outlaw woman” on the page, to create a disruptive, ungovernable, or unclassifiable text, is vital to my poetics, as it serves to ensure an intellectual and aesthetic freedom outside the binary, the linear, the traditional. “The duty of the writer,” Solmaz Sharif writes, “is to remind us that we die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is a tall order, which often requires a new kind of language, syntax, form, and/or approach. The outlaw or difficult text asks the reader to give themselves briefly to an unfamiliar world, to a particular mouth and mind, to another human being who will die but is not dead yet.
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A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White
DARLING
Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.
—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
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“And Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast.”
Maybe this is the dream
of the dead bathed in milk—
so many red feathers
in my mind. I remember being alive
as a child—on a towel in the grass,
from a white plastic kettle,
I poured air into a cup, two cups.
What else still but to imagine heat, sugar, death.
We drank nothing
and it was good.
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“‘A lady to take care of us at last,’ said one of the twins, ‘and you have killed her.’”
Smoothing the brain,
holding a knife to build another
mother. Like a house in the trees,
I wanted to believe in God
to be safe
and have somewhere to go.
We are all the same and inconsolable, legs twitching
during the nightmare. Please wake me up,
press one finger between my eyes
like a doorbell.
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“Perhaps she is frightened at being dead.”
Perhaps the cry, the electricity
before the mouth goes black,
glossy, and hollow. Perhaps all singing
aspires to silence (I have nothing
left to say), to burn down
the house where the song began.
Perhaps the sizzle in the teeth, the string
of smoke rising
from the lips, a hiss of opera, the last note (glittering)
sung but still in the air, half-charred,
half-disappearing.
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“He was begging Wendy to get better quickly, so that he could show her the mermaids.”
The world asks us to live, to imagine
their long red hair, the scales covering their tails,
layers of dark green
sequins. It is the possibility
of being both that is so appealing—
sick and beautiful, alive and dead, a woman and a fish
cut in half, cut in half, sewn together.
Wendy, get better—
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“But there was the arrow. He took it from [Wendy’s] heart and faced his band.”
If we live more than once, we must collect
sounds like nails
hammered to a wall, hanging images
on them afterward for the next life
to memorize. Maybe
we have been here
forever and are tired of being surprised: a snake carved from
silver coiled inside a red
box. We are not safe
and you will make
a beautiful bride.