from "The city has sex with everything"
The city has sex with Megan
when the air shaped like the inverse of Megan
accepts Megan as she moves.
If Megan is a system of exchange
that floats her labor and her point
of view in vapor/liquid soup
passàging through her valves
and if her later corpse, collapsing,
updates its inversion of the air
even more than did the air displace
when she grew from brown-eyed baby
into strong laboring woman in blue jeans
and heathered wool,
and if the air and earth draw from Megan’s corpse
all the energy and minerals
she pulled from her surrounds
to build her nails and bones and teeth—
if the exchange doesn’t stop
but only ceases to support her consciousness,
and if her consciousness was corpse anyway until
it found relation,
then what demises
is the potential for the human social,
and another sociality
will unbutton my whole shoe
and tongue hang limp,
what sex is for but stops me
at the barrier, a pixellated
glamor reef though very
close and simple, smell a
flurry, parapluie paraphrase,
energy funneled through a shape.
You filtered chemical
information in such a pointy
fulgent scrambled way, in the city
and outside the city in the vernal zones
and aqua zones the city shaped, flow-charted, realist
trucked. The city caved under
when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings,
manged foundations green,
rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city,
harbor high-rises
dark and blown. The city is extremely fragile tender
human mesh and will be mush
and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins
roam the rearticulated harm.
Speech by a flaneur—no a flaneuse
On my face, D. folliculorum are relaxing
like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks
against the bases of my hair follicles
which provide shelter and shade.
These critters are peculiar to
the ecology of the human face
which I take around the city
open, close it is my means
of feeding I rely on
changing its shape
in response to others’ faces and postures
to reduce my risk and increase my safety
and my likelihood of being
included in the group’s collective
life. I smile a lot and hope it
don’t look fake.
–Catherine Wagner (first appeared in Poetry)
Catherine Wagner is a Cincinnati poet originally from Baltimore. She is author of five books of poems, most recently Of Course (Fence, 2020) and Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012), and she recently co-edited a collection of environmental humanities essays, Contesting Extinctions (2021). She is professor of English at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she is organizing a labor union with colleagues.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner
Catherine Wagner’s extended poem, “The city has sex with everything,” like William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, is an epic built on the urban mundane. Instead of personifying the city (“a man in himself is a city”-W.C.W.), in this excerpt it depicts, as if from above, the city’s consumption of a person, Megan (“strong laboring woman in blue jeans / and heathered wool”) and also, I think, hers of it.
The poem is remarkable for its mating of metropolis with organic decay:
The city is extremely fragile tender
human mesh and will be mush
and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins
roam the rearticulated harm.
and also for its mating of the abstract/philosophical to the immediate/physical, done in pungent language:
what sex is for but stops me
at the barrier, a pixelated
glamour reef though very
close and simple, smell a
flurry, parapluie paraphrase,
The “pixelated / glamour reef” may call to mind comic-book illustration, while the last phrase, a ballet of p’s, lingers, dropleted, in mind and on the tongue.
The poem traffics in pulchritude and homeliness, giving both life and afterlife to its “manged foundations.”
Who is the “you”? Is it Megan? Us? It hardly matters, since matter is now so confounded with idea and association.
Then we arrive at a kind of window in which the poet [?] announces herself as Baudelaire and/or O’Hara-like “flaneuse,” where we see, in all its teeming vitality, “the ecology of a human face” in hyper-granular detail:
- folliculorum are relaxing
like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks
against the bases of my hair follicles
which provide shelter and shade
The extended poem, in a breath-taking alteration in scale, has taken us from observation-deck telescope to microscope; from the city’s destructive and destroyed life force to the intimacy of one human’s personal biosphere, in the process taking its diction from wet and marvelous hybridity to bland scientific specificity. Cartoonist Sir John Tenniel was the organism-portmanteau illustrator for Alice in Wonderland. As these ultra-specific organisms relax, they imitate art. Catherine Wagner’s riveting and wonderful dystopian “The City Has Sex with Megan,” after having its brilliant way with us, ends by conveying the poet’s forlorn hope of survival, fronted by a humble, demotic teeth-baring:
I smile a lot and hope it
don’t look fake
-Angela Ball