Jody's Notes
Dramatic poetry masquerading as confessional poetry. It's a bit dangerous--the genre I mean. Because you get blamed for all sorts of things. One magazine rejected the poem tersely: Try a Feminist magazine, they told me. But (so I thought) the poem doesn't express any political views whatsoever. It's a complex expression of a particular person's rage (and her other emotions as well). And besides, I'm male. And besides, if someone does try to read the poem politically, it doesn't come across as Feminist, on the contrary. It comes across as anti-Feminist. (If it comes across either one way or the other, I mean.) Which some other people objected to, by the way: that I was presenting an anti-abortion stance in the poem. But (I protested again), the poem isn't depicting any attitude about abortion at all. Not my attitudes, not anyone else's attitudes either--certainly it isn't making a political statement (about abortion or about anything else, for that matter).
So one wonders, of course, are poems read carefully? Or do people just respond to the emotion by getting all heated up themselves, expressing all sorts of things they feel, most of them irrelevant to the poem they've read?
After I saw that T.V. special the other night
after Mom told me again I’d never been breastfed,
I remembered again the baby
you made me throw away
like garbage. It was something crawling
out of a sea gasping for air
while your doctor friends
pushed its face into a toilet.
I hope your life is almost over.
You were supposed to be nervous,
chewing your fingernails,:
their half moons setting bloody in your cuticles;
your eyes black with ash, your cheeks wet.
But instead the nurse saw you put your face
down on my bed and snore
like a motor while somewhere else
in another room where you didn’t have to see it,
they scrapped my insides.
It could have been a girl.
But instead her fleshy crib threw her up
and afterwards my breasts hurt
as if they wanted to spit.
Hopefully, late at night sometime,
when you’re drunk enough for it
to make an impression,
something dead will recognize you’re its father
and reach for your ankle through a sewer grate.
© 1991 Jody Azzouni