American Proper
Jennifer Merrifield
Reinventing Exit
In the fourth year of our resurrection
we gave up talk of horizon, forecast,
guidewire. Gave ourselves to the mirror,
called the shadows water,
fell back to bed till every day’s
the same day, the same sun opening.
Inside our TVs we pilgrim to Liberty Island
to see inside the body of freedom
but there’s no sheet to pin down
between books no crisp linen
to drape the chairs no play-fort
whispering bring on the safe haven.
A diaspora of swept-shut lids, here the kissed
butter their mouths like bread, eating
and eating, crumbs scooped from the ground
to make cake from all this batter.
Thought like drapes drawn forever open:
head beats wall, maze stops mouse—
it’s better in coaxial, some glass between.
isbn 1-59661-093-X
37 pages/$9
The wonderfully encrypted poems of American Proper walk a fine line between private speech and public utterance, accumulating into a sense of a self being put together before my eyes, an identity constructed by the poems themselves, their music and imagination, their independence from the received.
--Bob Hicok, Horse of a different feather
Jennifer Merrifield's poems fracture the expectation of strict narrative. Here, readers will find unusual images juxtaposed to stunning effect. Merrifield has a knack for selecting the telling detail that will illuminate while not giving everything away, so there is still work for a reader to do. That work pays off in insights and shimmers of recognition. These are muscular, ambitious poems.
--Margot Schilpp, author of The World’s Last Night and Laws of My Nature
Jennifer Merrifield completed her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. Winner of the 2006 Columbia Poetry Prize, the 2007 42Opus Editor’s Select Prize, and a featured emerging writer in Natural Bridge, she teaches at Potomac State College of WVU and lives in Cumberland, Maryland.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications in which the following poems first appeared, sometimes in different form:
Natural Bridge: “Picnicking in Dorset Park,” “Cold Harbor”
Words & Images: “We are needles. We thread ourselves and stitch every cloth with visions.”
Phoebe: “American Proper”
Harpur Palate: “Conspadamo, Artery and Eyelet,” “The Light’s Last Glimmer”
Sycamore Review: “2004 Slips into the Back Pocket”
Diner: “What Lingers”
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art: “Interior as Rubik’s Cube”
Redactions: “The End Is the Beginning Is No Matter”
42Opus: “Answering the Whistle, the Glare,” “Postscript”
Can We Have Our Ball Back?: “Not Nervousness,” “Maps We Forget to Make”
New Zoo Poetry Review: “Making Depth, We Ruler and Compass”
Fourteen Hills: “Incognito”
“American Proper” also appeared in White Ink, Rishma Dunlop, Editor, Toronto: Demeter Press, 2007.
Special thanks to judge Karen Volkman and Columbia for awarding the 2006 Columbia Poetry Prize to “Interior as Rubik’s Cube”; to 42Opus for awarding the 2007 Editor’s Select Prize to “Postscript”; to the editors of Phoebe, Seattle Review, and Words & Images for selecting poems in this collection as finalists in their annual contests; and to Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr. for selecting additional poems as the emerging writer feature in Natural Bridge 17.
Contents
Reinventing Exit 1
Picnicking in Dorset Park 2
Interior No. 1: Planes 3
We are needles. We thread ourselves and stitch every cloth with visions. 4
American Proper 5
Conspadamo, Artery and Eyelet 7
Poem Masquerading As an Old Lover’s Photo 8
How the Body Flees Inertia 9
The Light’s Last Glimmer 10
Darwin’s Waiting 12
2004 Slips into the Back Pocket 14
What Lingers 16
Interior As Rubik’s Cube 18
The End Is the Beginning Is No Matter 19
Negligence 20
Answering the Whistle, the Glare 21
Malleable Edge 22
Postscript 23
Maps We Forget to Make 24
If Tombstones Were This Tall: Another Elegy for the Unmet Self 25
Not Nervousness 27
Cold Harbor 28
Making Depth, We Ruler and Compass 30
Incognito 31
Windswept, the Interior Takes Stock 33
The Art of Hesitant Door Opening 34