Fish Clamor

meet me in front of a jazz club

in new orleans; there i’ll kiss you

hard. you have been lover

to me through lives upon deaths, your fingers

spread in my hair, your demolition kiss

a wrecking ball through love affairs

& marriages. but that night, before i knew

your kiss so well, it was & we were two martinis drunk

one after the other; the steering wheel biting

my ribs, my hands clutching at anything

under the headrest behind you.  Surprised at the bar,

still standing when we emerged:

I wondered how, having spent a lifetime of breath

in that one kiss, how the things of this world remain standing.

–Jennifer woodworth

Many thanks to Flashquake, who first published this poemin slightly different form in 2009.

My prose chapbook, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, published by Monkey Puzzle Press, is a book with several sketches and short works of fiction about the obsessions and dark thoughts of mothers and babies; it is available for three bucks as an ebook. You know you want it.

Write me at Jen at )Fishclamor( dot com. Love to send you one. You’ll like it, I know you will.

(If this email doesn’t work, please let me know in comments?)

Thank you!

This is for you, a message thirty years later from “Esmeralda the Gypsy,” who read your palm that Halloween, that brilliant, cold fall night when the whole university was out in costume. The maple candy melted in our mouths, and the deep red in the leaves chased the yellow away—do you remember we’d learned that only during a fall of cold, bright days, will the sugar in the maples freeze into red. Did street lights ever make a place more like a movie set? Or was it the thousands of students outside in costume? That giant carrot—I knew it was you—only you would have dyed a whole sheet electric orange, wrapped it around you tight from knees to head, chosen that wild carrot hair.I grabbed your carrot hands, turned them over, silently studied them before I told you the story of your life—who you loved, whether she loved you too, how many children, your happiness then and now, how much of yourself you give away in love, the steadiness of your heart, the difference between what’s left and what’s kept; what you’d made of what had been given you; what you’ve made by now of what you’ve been given. Turn it over—the back of your hand, this finger, here—you’re good at math? Yes, if you want to—you like to count, you. You don’t read, this is art you’ll never make, though the mind of genius will be in your hands—where do you lose your desire for it—and at that instant, an enormous rabbit sprang out of his hole to chase you, and you became a giant carrot with flying green crepe-paper hair running down the street, turning over cards and tables, changing candy for prayers and for dreams, and you ran off with the true love you’d find in your late twenties, your marriage, your generosity in love, and the children you’d have, all clutched in your hands— did you keep your fist closed long enough to put them, safe, under your pillow? I hear their candy wrappers and their screaming even now—was it delight or terror you felt? Were stage lights in the dark enough to turn you around, to chase the giant white rabbit away? At least you were on the right side of the looking glass—and there in the lights with thousands of students in costumes, we walked or ran or rolled in raked-up piles of leaves in front yards—that dazzling, numinous fall, and this is what I knew of you that would not be true for decades, but would be true nonetheless many times— the candy the lights your true love your long happiness the babies the bunny and I knew you, I knew you then.

–Jennifer Woodworth

Thanks to Ginosko Literary Journal for first publishing this piece, in October 2016  number 18.

Maternal Horror

Jennifer Woodworth’s newest book, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, which is just out by Monkey Puzzle Press, is a most gentle jaunt into the genre of Maternal Horror.  ‘Maternal Horror’ is a term I have had to coin myself.  But this is not Rosemary’s Baby.  This is the Brahms Lullaby of Xtreme Mothering.  The baby and child in these stories and sketches comprise a wonderful blessing – so wonderful, that we follow our first person hero as if pushing off down the pipe of some Xtreme Sport …  Right down the rabbit hole of maternal instinct, without time to say, “Hello!  Goodbye!” into a sort of mental ward where the ordinary and quotidian prerogatives of life conflict to our first person narrator’s charming wonderment.  And off we go, as the book paints a gentle rebellion for two.

“I have never wanted anything more than I want babies.”  The narrator tells us at the beginning of the first and best story, “Mother of One”.  And shortly she adds:

“I want another baby,” I say to my husband.”

“I know you do,” he says.  He means he does not want another child, not now, not ever.”

How charged and compact that exchange is!

Our author knows a subtext, and next to that, a rebellious flight of words.  All of this makes for a good read.  Her stories churn in the updraft of a contained conflagration.  Her words and flights of fancy are cloaked like actors to carry more romantic weight.  But all of the ducks here are rubber ducks.  Her first person narrator “contains multitudes” of insight, but all from an idea fixee.  Her first person narrator is entirely rational aside from being mostly fixated.  Imagine an Asperger of mothering, with the soft voice, and gentle nudging of the genuinely aware – and you’ll be getting close to the voice of this narrator.

The interest of the first story, “Mother of One” – which is a lovely jolt of maternal compulsion – is deciding partly where the horror lies.  Is the Surrogate Mother, or is the Outsourcing Birth Mother the monster of this tale.  Is it the narrator’s world which is a bit off kilter – or is it the narrator?  The ending tale finds our heroine legally confined but still rebellious.   Though it wouldn’t surprise me to hear our narrator reply from her ward – in an attractive way and with an appealing tone, (or perhaps she would just ‘suggest’), if asked, ‘how it could be “rebelling” when the world is backaswards?’.

Jennifer Woodworth has a playful dramatic sense, writes a fine narrative, composes a lovely tune with her words, and is smart enough to say things worth reading.  This is a small book to purchase and enjoy, and possibly to start your collection with.