Issue 3:1 | View | Carol Mason

Dear Poet for Hire:

An open letter to those who’ve seen enough

Carol Mason

I saw your sign: poor poet for hire, buy this haiku for a buck, two for a good one. Ten for a sonnet, Petrarchan or not. Twenty-five for villanelles. Well, here’s forty dollars. A therapist is more, so I’m coming to you – to help me sort out this shit on TV.

See, the stuff they’re showing I know is nothing new because, well, wars have been forever and poetry attests to that. There are odes and elegies and laments and protests: lots of verse that serves to honor or atone. So I’ve known, because I’m an educated woman, that shit like this goes on. I mean on the grand scale. I mean atrocities and history and humanity’s failings. Hell, I teach about the Holocaust and lynching and I assign Forche and Morrison. Even when the two towers fell I had faith that language held meaning. I never bought the line that no poetry could follow Auschwitz. Nothing’s beyond representation – nothing that can survive. So I’ve got two twenties for you because although I know atrocities happen every day, every era, every so-called civilization, this is here and now.

Here in West Virginia we see how we are positioned. Mountaineers are always free, unless you join up to pay for college and someone starts a war and your humvee overturns in Iraq and you, prone in a stretcher, become the pentagon poster girl to boost morale and justify the margins of error. A year of body bags goes by and it’s time to flip that coin, heads for tails. So West Virginia womanhood comes out on top of the great pyramid of our shame, stands atop the ash-heap of our history. She is posed for the camera, a khaki dominatrix who needs no rescue, a kinky leash called Freedom in her hand.

In a mouth that might talk like mine, a cigarette dangles like flaccid military will. This photography is dumb, won’t let her talk, just shows her there, hardly inhaling. Her smoke is a faggot, a casually burning stick lit but gone limp in scenes of forced fellatio. They call her hillbilly deviant, picture her among bodies piled like sacrifices or sausages on sale at Hickory Farms in the mall, right next to the new recruitment stores targeting the jobless in Barboursville, Charleston, where I grew up, Parkersburg, Pittsburgh, where I once taught.

Now it’s time to flip the coin again, tails for heads. And now it makes me sick. I’ve never seen a decapitation, never seen someone beheaded before. Not someone from Pennsylvania. Not someone who could have been in my class if he hadn’t gone to war.

Dear poet, just a minute. I’m feeling queasy again. Well, let me put this order in before I blow like the night before. They say the flu’s going around, but I’m not sure. I was puking bile well into the morning, making animal sounds and seeing that could-be student, that could’ve-been student, with his severed head. A fever rose in mine time and again until dry heaves brought up algae then foam, all the world devolving to primal slime before my runny eyes. I slept between the heaving times, passed out it seems now, only to wake to the same urgent inferno. All the while I knew this was nothing, this was the flu. Nothing compared to those prisoners and that boy who should’ve been writing papers I would’ve graded.

In the rise and fall of my small wretchedness that night, I dreamed that my own school-marm glasses – the instrument through which I see the world, without which I am blind – those frames were made of meat. Spectacles of flesh, I tried trimming them to fit my American face.

Help me, dear poet for hire. Write something about forgiveness and sorrow and purging. Tell the world we know we own these atrocities. Only poets can represent us now.