Journal Fragments
after Ocean Vuong
do you ever notice how loud you breathe?
like there is a chorus of warnings underneath everything you say?
do you ever feel sad with a sadness that is older than you?
do you ever jump when a rolling chair slams into a wall?
do you ever wanna do a seance? so you can be like
“excuse me, you cannot leave these peach pits
all over my platelets for me to deal with”
but actually you’re alive with hands that can dig into dirt
to plant trees, so get out of bed.
i wrote on a paper You Are Alone
and then i read it out loud because i needed to hear it
i need to get used to this
the egg is part of my face now
psoriasis is just my body making confetti, i’m such a fun cool girl
sometimes i wanna be like ‘i cant come
to the phone now, i’m distracted by the handsomeness of dale cooper’
but i don’t want anyone to think it’s a masturbation joke
i enjoy counting his eyelashes
the world needs to drink a glass of water
without spiking it
i wish i could go into ambiguous romantic interactions with a sign around my neck that says
I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER
i went to the bar and the men are weird and bad when they drink
like how are you gonna try to kiss me without first holding my hand
without first asking for my number without first waiting seven years
for me to figure out My Whole Deal With Existing Inside of a Body
rebeccalynn says that women of color always feel out of orbit
& maybe that’s why we desire a love knocked off its axis
everyone i’ve ever loved has also felt like an alien inside their body
i love many people who love trees. fruits don’t stop growing
from the trees we write about. is the heart a fruit or is it a pit?
church is picking plums alone on 5th ave in bklyn as bells ring
as the morning sun patterns my face as i’m thinking of my family,
my friends, how they make me believe in the atmosphere as a network
of ears connected by red strings across oceans
i asked hannah about poetry and they said i’m gonna throw your wound in the river
we laughed and laughed and laughed
first published in Cosmonauts Avenue (link here)
buy Jess Rizkallah’s book, The Magic My Body Becomes, here
It’s hard to talk about this poem because I love everything about it. I love all of Jess’ work. She’s a poet who writes with such audacious joy and such audacious criticism. And she does these little things all throughout her work. Like bring her mom into a poem. Like bring her friends. There’s poetry that feels institutional, and then there’s poetry that feels of-this-world. Jess’ poetry is the latter. It’s like being on a really fucking big couch, and someone is making soup in the background, and the moon is really fucking huge, so huge you could read by its light.
The poem this is modeled after — Ocean Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments” — is also a poem of such beautiful, sudden tangential shifts. A lot of people focus on the ending lines, which contain this beautiful prayer:
Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through
to get here.
But I’m always struck by these two lines earlier in the poem:
I think I love my mom very much.
Some grenades explode with a vision of white flowers.
That’s the beauty of this kind of fragmented form. You can jam-up two seemingly unrelated ideas right up against one another. I mean, come on. The uncertainty around loving one’s own mother, and then the pure certainty around the strange, terrible, unwanted beauty implicit in violence, this wholly unholy thing. It’s remarkable.
I’m going to say “what I love the most” a lot when I refer to Jess’ poem, but what I love the most (part 1/many) is the way it begins with a series of questions. And not just any questions. I mean, really. Some of the most specific, gorgeous, perfect questions. Questions that relate, by virtue of their specificity, to the deepest recesses of our compassionate, scared, and tender selves. Look at them again:
do you ever notice how loud you breathe?
like there is a chorus of warnings underneath everything you say?do you ever feel sad with a sadness that is older than you?
do you ever jump when a rolling chair slams into a wall?
Imagine reading a poem that began with those four lines and saying oh, this is not a poem. This is a poem, in the truest sense of the word. One of the beautiful consequences of poetry is when we, the readers, are given language to identify what we have felt for a long time, but have never had the solidarity of knowing those feelings were felt somewhere else in the world, too, by someone else. So when Jess writes: “do you ever feel sad with a sadness that is older than you” — it’s so hard for me to imagine anyone saying no. And then, already, the poem has a kind of purpose. It unites the many varied and different and wild pieces of lives that come to the poem and read it.
There’s so much love in this poem. And it’s not just in the lines that read:
everyone i’ve ever loved has also felt like an alien inside their body
i love many people who love trees.
These are unbelievable lines. Full of love. Full of acknowledgment of being alone in the world, alone in the thing we call the self. But the love in this poem is also in the way Jess writes about friendship, in the way Jess writes about family, in the way Jess writes about drinking a simple glass of water. It’s there in the criticism this poem levies against masculinity, and it’s there in the way the body becomes “confetti.” It’s there in the reimagination of previous structures, how “church is picking plums alone on 5th ave in bklyn.” Which reminds me of Ross Gay’s “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” which is an utterly un-excerptable poem because of its form, but includes the lines:
soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
Please go read that poem if you haven’t, and when you do, see that Jess’ poem here is part of this wonderful patchwork of poems that begins in the world and reimagines our singular and collective connections to this world. To be both of the world and out of the world is such a brilliant thing. Jess’ work is a testament to that kind of transcendence, and generosity.
Part of what offers this feeling is the form of this poem, this collection of journalistic fragments. There is — and probably will forever be — an ongoing debate in the world of writing about the need to connect dots or simply leave them, about the purpose of or need for white space. It’s always struck me not as a needless debate, but as an unanswerable one, one of those debates that can simply be answered it works when it works. But to go deeper, the use of fragments in this poem works because it enacts the way a mind works when it is forever in touch with the world, because being forever in touch with the world means being in love, and anxious, and worried, and full of care. This poem is all of those things and more. It also enacts a level of unending specificity and vulnerability. So many of my favorite poets are so deeply connected to the self of the speaker. I have the great joy of knowing Jess, but I do not know every poet I read. And if I did not know Jess, I imagine my first feeling upon reading this poem would be gratitude — to be the recipient of such generosity, such givingness.
To be human is to make the worst of things and to make light of things at the same time. This poem does this and more. And maybe my last favorite part of this poem is the way there are friends in this poem. Rebeccalynn. Hannah. These friends, and their existence within the poem, point the poem toward a more compassionate truth than merely poetry, a truth that says yes, I am writing about the world, but I am also loving you. Just as Ross Gay’s poem has lines that read “yes I am anthropomorphizing / goddammit,” this poem also is unafraid to be wholly itself.
Some people, I guess, might say that poetry exists above the world, from some different angle. But this poem does not. It says here is my life, I am still trying to make sense of it, and maybe you are, too. It asks. It begs to include you, the reader. It begs to include us all. The couch this poem offers is wide. It lives in a living room where someone is cooking for everyone, where another person is asking have you heard this song before. It ends with laughter. It ends with poetry being a wound thrown in a river. It returns us — through poetry — back to the world again. And I am changed upon reentry. Maybe you are, too.