Throughout this year, I will be featuring essays by poets I love and admire in response to poems of their choosing. They will appear at random, whenever such poets are moved. I’m honored to include the first installment this week, by the poet Bailey Cohen-Vera, writing about Aria Aber’s poem “America.”
A note on the poem: Substack formatting is tricky, and will not always faithfully reprint indents in poetic lines. To read the poem in its original publication, please click here.
America
America the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones weighting my center
America the old girls’ campus in the heart of Oakland where I teach
Grows quiet as glass marbles rolling between my feet
I pick one up, I say It’s pretty
And my students laugh, cheering Welcome to America
I have no one to look to this summer, I light a candle, burn the proposedly holy wood
And God does not come when summoned
Just the scent of bonfire in my hair
Gold light flooding the bay window sure as a divination
America I divine nothing
In the other country, my parents wear their silence like silk robes each morning, devoted to the terrible sun
Day after day, I weep on the phone, saying Even the classroom is a prison
And still my father insists But it is good to become an American
And so I cement my semantics
I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country
After saying I love
I rinse my aquiline face, wring my language for fear
I feared what had happened in your forest, the words that pursued the soft silk of spiders
The verbs were naturalize, charge, reside
The nouns were clematis, alien, hibiscus
America I arrived to inhabit the realm of your language
I came to worry your words
What you offered is a vintage apartment, an audience for poems
Pills the color of dusk
To swallow so as not to collapse when I read the poem about my uncle
The reading of which I owe him, to everyone who antecedes me
No, I mean who haunts me
The haunting of which is a voice
The West is too young to be haunted, an ex-lover assures
Still, every night I listen to your voice scraping against my walls
And in the mornings, trivial offerings on my pillows
I pick the spiders from my bed, flush their curled transparence down the drain
America I don’t know what to make of my ordinary cruelty
Or my newly bourgeois pain
Venom lacing each crack of the historic apartment
Venom lacing the porcelain plates we hand out at parties
In the hallway I let someone touch me under my mask
Three fingers in my mouth
My back pushed against the door, the cold sink
The mind plays where it leads, a dark hour, the weight of a body on indigo tiles
America the scale says not thin enough
America my lawyer suggests to keep quiet about certain things
About you and me
So I write in my notebook your name, I write Country of
Cowboys and Fame
America I have no cowboy
And I have no fame
All I gather is the scratching of ink against paper, the laugh of a skeptic
There are nights we hear something likened to fireworks lighting up the humid campus
And my students cheer, they laugh Welcome to America
Later in the empty corridor, the disembodied voice of my uncle
Saying The classroom is not a prison
Saying Go, go home now and so I go
Past vetiver and cedar, past eucalyptus declaring the shoreline
Until I shiver on the soft-stoned coast on which my father once lay
And I proclaim what he did, I say This land is my fate
America who am I becoming here with you
If I wander the same as without you, barely visible amid your indigenous trees
from Poetry (January 2021)
Audre Lorde said “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses.” This calling implies a sinister counterweight—if revolution must grow to be constant, something that one is to integrate, practically and daily, into their livelihood, it is only because the oppressive conditions that require such revolution are more effectively perpetual, more firmly standardized, and more observably unflinching. The tension self-actualized by many who discover they are residing in (and quite possibly actively benefiting from) the empirical core is a particular burden. There becomes, for those who do the work to go through the process of this recognition, three possible routes of escape: participation, incredulity, or intuitive, keen unhappiness. Often, all three coalesce. At such an intersection, the speaker of Aria Aber’s America “weep[s] on the phone saying Even the classroom is a prison.” Participation in the classroom means participation in the construction of students from whose labor the empire will ultimately profit. There is no escape from the American classroom’s history, as a violent method of forced assimilation unto Indigenous peoples, nor the American classroom’s present and future consequences, which the speaker / instructor plays an essential role in molding. And what if the reader disagrees in this diagnosis of the classroom-as-prison? How long have they thought about such declarations? It is as if the poem anticipates the question, “What good is it to call a prison a prison to those who have been imprisoned?” acknowledging the only possible audience that can legitimately offer a difference of opinion, based off their own tangible, lived experience. Thus the refute supplied by the father figure in the poem is simple: “[But] it is good to become an American.” An American is someone who does not live in a prison.
Yet, we are built by the empire we inhabit. We hide in its trees, we revel in its fireworks. It is always present because it is lingering. “America the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones weighting my center,” begins Aria Aber’s poem, an accusatory, dangling, punctuationless sentiment that interprets the haunting of whiteness: it is what is left behind by those that America leaves behind. A ghosts’ footprints serve to be evidence of the unobservable; whiteness can only be studied through its effect. Yet engagement is omnipresent, unavoidable—and of resistance? “…God does not come when summoned.” The only non-secular entities present in the poem are what haunts the poem: ghosts, the spectre of whiteness. So what can be done in the absence of the divine? “America I divine nothing,” the speaker laments, before resolving to “cement [their] semantics…rinse [their] aquiline face, wring [their] language for fear.” Is it the use of language without fear what makes an American?
Blissfully ignorant of that lurking question, “From what?” an American is someone who understands their own security. The speaker of Aber’s poem undertakes a transaction: “I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country / After saying I love.” But a transaction must occur between more than just one party, and so America is given a body, a voice in the form of the poem’s “you.” America is handsome; it provides. “What you offered is a vintage apartment, an audience for poems / Pills the color of dusk / To swallow so as not to collapse when I read the poem about my uncle,” Aber writes, as her poem’s speaker admits that even brief moments of resistance, such as the reading of a poem honoring their uncle and “everyone [else] who antecedes [them],” have been meaningfully infiltrated. “America I don’t know what to make of my ordinary cruelty,” pleads Aber’s speaker, “Or my newly bourgeois pain.” An American is someone who can only recognize pain, finding themselves too conveniently and systemically distant to impact its source.
After finding themselves physically residing in a system of which they are ideologically at ends, the cyclical brutality of the American system offers assimilation as a pathway of survival. Empire and capital depend on their participants to act on their behalf, as evidenced by the introduction of the pronoun “we” in the poem: “Venom lacing the porcelain plates we hand out at parties.” This captures the completeness of the American experience—by participating in and conforming to this country and its legacy, we are, quite literally, slowly killing ourselves and each other, though perhaps not as dramatically as with corrupted tableware. Instead, a culture of gross overconsumption contributes to devastating and continually unprecedented climate change, and the mandatory collection of taxes, the cost of being allowed to exist in that culture, funds a carceral surveillance state. But should you pay this price, you are allowed the quiet luxury of ignoring its consequences. You are allowed to throw a party. Such demonstrations of grandeur certainly have their roles in this poem. The speaker’s plates are porcelain. The campus wherein the speaker lectures “grows quiet as glass marbles.” Their apartment is “vintage,” then, “historic;” “Gold light flood[s]” its windows,” “sure as a divination.” And when the day ends, and natural light ceases, even what could be potentially violent is negotiated into an opportunity for beauty: “There are nights we hear something likened to fireworks lighting up the humid campus / And my students cheer, they laugh Welcome to America.” What could an American know about beauty?
Still, the land that America occupies is indeed a beautiful place. After the subject of the speaker’s poem, their uncle, reassures them, saying “The classroom is not a prison,” imploring them to “Go, go home,” the reader accompanies the speaker on this short journey, baring witness to the intimate beauty of the natural world. “Past vetiver and cedar, past eucalyptus declaring the shoreline // Until I shiver on the soft-stoned coast on which my father once lay,” Aber writes, as the poem for the first time denotes an “other” space, an isolated brevity in which, for a moment, there is no interaction with empire, nor its tool of capital, nor its guilt of indulgence. At last, the speaker is allowed solace, and is able to meditate on a useful, urgent, and loaded question: “America who am I becoming here with you / If I wander the same as without you, barely visible amid your indigenous trees.” Here, the poem’s conceit of (internalized) conflict manifests in a consideration of not only how to exist within and without, before and after American confrontation, but of the very essence of ownership, as the possessive pronoun “your,” referring to “America,” the state, is placed beside the deliberate adjective “indigenous,” referring to the natural, persistent trees. The speaker is “barely visible” among them, as if hiding. Perhaps they mean to take refuge from the slow violence of the empirical system, or perhaps they mean to bide their time and eventually strike. Regardless of purpose, of position, of time—it is evident that an American is someone who waits.
** ** **
Originally, the above paragraphs performed an entirety of my response to Aber’s poem, which I consider to be a precise reckoning of the complexities that accompany the seemingly futile attempt to reject American identity after it has been (forcibly) embodied. Days, a word whose practical definition has shifted sporadically for me since March, have passed. Since I began drafting this piece, the Congressional building of this nation’s capitol was breached by a disorganized posse of petite bourgeois dissenters that, to borrow a term from the twitter of former Bolivian president Evo Morales, were attempting to enact a “self-coup.” Despite the possession of light weaponry and zip-ties, it became clear, rather quickly, that this angry sludge of counterrevolutionaries had no idea what to do with said munitions—it has been reported that one of the four people that died in the attempt tased themselves, inducing a heart attack—but, even more significantly, they had no plan for an action once the sun set and they were forced to retire to their hotel rooms. Somehow, this floundering band of baboons earned themselves comparisons to highly trained, well-funded, U.S. empire-backed insurrectionists that were bribed and deployed in the global south to halt nation-spanning social movements at odds with the interests of corporations based in the United States. Former U.S. president George W. Bush released a statement to this effect, saying “Laura and I are watching the scenes of mayhem unfolding at the seat of our Nation’s government in disbelief and dismay…This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic—not our democratic republic.” This is all to say: I know I am an American because of my anger.
There is anger in my reading of Aria Aber’s “America.” I am angry at the poem because I am angry at the speaker, and I am angry at the speaker because the speaker is me. I find despair within my “ordinary cruelty” and loathe “my newly bourgeois pain.” My mother came to this country when she was eighteen, fleeing poverty, a violent household, and tumultuous regime change (Ecuador has had more constitutions, twenty, in its 212-year history, than any other country in South America). She did everything she was supposed to do. She learned English, married a citizen, and achieved middle class by working odd jobs and eventually opening up a small business in the suburbs of New Jersey with my father—all before I turned 14 and went to high school. I was 17 when Donald Trump was elected. I became obsessed with understanding America and its empire of capital, I studied the history of U.S. interference in Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Cuba and Brasil. In the past year, I’ve grown confused and disgusted with myself, as my discussions with my mother became more specific and argumentative. Who was I, someone who lived off the sacrifices of my parents, to tell them that their fulfillment of the “American Dream” was a necessary allowance of a propaganda machine intent on keeping the poor impoverished? How could I look them in the eye and argue the devastating effects of suburbia on the environment after they had spent nearly two decades putting aside money to move away from cities, after that same suburban lifestyle had afforded their children better education and freer, safer upbringings? I found this phenomena too in the poem, when the speaker is softly reprimanded by the spirit of their uncle—"The classroom is not a prison”—and is left, after faltering on their incomparable experiences, with nothing to say. I am an American; at times it feels as if I have experienced nothing.
In the safety of such a devoid of experience, study became an escape that I confused for quiet action. I am in graduate school for an MFA in poetry, a genre which I came to after the suicide of my grandmother. When I was done, or so I thought, with the initial stages of grieving, my poems began to veer towards the explicitly political, concerning topics such as immigration and queerness. Addicted to the endorphin rush provided by acceptance letters, publication and subsequent, meaningless relevance on Twitter dot com, I began to mine the experience of relatives for content to put in my writing. I began to write immigration narratives that weren’t mine to write, seeking the approval of blurryfaced editors or fellowship boards, some of whom would offer money in exchange for the publishing of what had become intellectual property. It is easy to draw parallels, albeit dramatic ones, between this dishonest labor and the extraction of natural resources and labor by corporations in the global south. It was the American in me that conflated honoring and the performance of honoring, a dilemma captured by Aria Aber in just two lines: “The reading of which I owe him, to everyone who antecedes me // No, I mean who haunts me.”
Thus, I’ve become increasingly distrustful of the single-poem as a form. What can be done in it? What lamenting can be deemed “useful”? Is poetry something that should be concerned with its tangible, real-world effect? Is it even possible to argue in the negative? This past December, I completed a draft of an academic paper on the language of counterrevolutionary propaganda utilized by the CIA in Guatemala after the small country nationalized the land of banana plantations owned by the Boston-based United Fruit Company. It had been an obsession, and I thought I would feel proud upon its completion, but instead I felt empty. I felt as if my work had been entirely removed from its practicality; I was writing, simply and frustratingly, for other academics. Even the classroom is a prison, I wept again in my newly bourgeois pain.
I admire this poem because I know what it says about me. It isolates my Americanness and forces me to confront what I detest. Read aloud, I embody the poem’s “I,” and its confessional tone becomes participatory, multidirectional. I, me—I am the one saying what is in the poem. I am what I am ashamed of, and I am the one who must find practical, tangible ways of contending with this shame. Rarely, if ever, can this contention be a poem. But the poem knows this. This is why I believe it ends in a call to action, of sorts, demanding that its American audience ask of themselves, “America who am I becoming here with you / If I wander the same as without you”? And so, if I am to honestly write a response to this poem, if I am to put into practice Audre Lorde’s calling for small moments of revolution and “decolonize” the close-reading, and if I am to look my Americanness in its eye, I must do my part in answering this question too.
Bailey Cohen-Vera is an Ecuadorian-American poet, essayist, and book reviewer. Currently serving as the Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Iowa Review, Southern Indiana Review, Waxwing, Grist, Poetry Northwest, The Spectacle, and Cherry Tree, among elsewhere. Bailey is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU, where he serves as a Wiley Birkhofer Fellow, writing obsessively about bananas. His website is baileycohenpoetry.weebly.com.