well, i’m still writing. i am also growing to accept the fact that i’m unsuited to millennial-style internet authorship, and am finding the reconciliation of this increasingly difficult… so, we’ll see where it goes. odds are, i’ll continue to be unreliable.
I spent a lot of time as a kid pretending to be Helen Keller. I would bolt scarves across my eyes, shove my mother’s earplugs into my head, and attempt to go about my life, scrabbling over stairs and grasping for bannisters in the blank space. When I conceived of losing senses, I thought the big two: sight and sound. I never thought one could lose the sense of touch.
In my first semester of college, I did just that. Suffering from a severe B12 deficiency as a result of accidental veganism, rubbish diet, and certain dumbass recreational activities, I woke up one morning in my twin dorm bed to discover a sensation like all of my body had fallen asleep. No matter how I twisted and turned, I couldn’t jumpstart the blood flow back to normal.
A B12 deficiency manifests itself with, among other symptoms, some exciting neurological side effects. This includes but is not restricted to the abolishment of the sense of touch and persistent paresthesias, which is the fancy name for “pins and needles.” If left untreated, it can cause permanent damage. When I’m very tired or very drunk, a ghostly tingling still clings to my hands, the tactile equivalent of vocal slurring.
I tend to find the poets that mean the most to me during the most difficult times of my life. I’m not sure if that says more about the poet (they are actually that amazing), me (I go looking for literary friends when I am lonely) or the situation (when I am sad even the backs of cereal boxes strike me as unbearably poignant). Regardless of my motives, Ada Limòn is really that great.
The first Ada Limòn poem I read was “Crush”, and I found it inside an old copy of the New Yorker in the periodicals room of my college library. I remember thinking incongruously, damn girl!
It was the summer after I graduated college. Having dated a long string of recent alumni, I was familiar intellectually with the idea of post-graduate depression. They had all gone through it all: the moping, the missing Reed, the complete breakdowns over their futures, the “maybe I’ll go to grad school”, even one case of “maybe I’ll join the military!”. I thought I was prepared. I was not. Graduation happened to coincide with another spectacular loss of stability. While I was in school I was able to divert my downfall by focusing intently on my thesis, but when I got my diploma I felt I was getting thrown out of my home with nothing but a little pressed pulp to soften the fall.
I wouldn’t say I was broken, like the year I found Jack Gilbert. My breakdown was showier, more self-destructive. I would say maybe I was a little on fire. Or perhaps combusting. I was running that summer, literally and figuratively, pounding the pavement and dodging my past.
After I read “Crush”, I immediately googled the hell out of Ada Limòn. The second poem of hers I read was “Leaving for Leaving’s Sake”. When I biked home I remember reciting quietly to myself, Bring me the road, bring me the thick-black/ of nothing, let me swallow the asphalt/ eat that yellow line until it splits me in two.
The next day I biked to Powells and immediately forked out precious, unemployed dollars for her latest book Sharks in the Rivers. I would have bought everything she published, but they only had Sharks.
There are so many amazing poems in Sharks. The first one I underlined was the last segment of “The Widening Road”: “She cannot decide what she desires, but today it is enough / that she desires and desires. That she is a body/ in the world, wanting, the wind itself becoming / her own wild whisper.” All of Ada Limòn’s poetry speaks to that wild part of you, the internal heat you feel when the world bowls you over with its madness and its beauty. Or when you feel a great urban despair, the horror of newspapers halfway across the world, and how we cope with tragedy on the way to the grocery store. Read “The Same Thing”.
I think the one word I would most use to describe Ada Limòn would be tender. There is an enormous amount of empathy and compassion in every stanza of her work, a real love of the world.
Things I learned from Ada Limòn: Unleash that terrible tenderness you feel towards the world in your work. Find the sharks in the rivers, the birds in the city. Put your feelings into concrete images and make them talk.
I think I am still trying to be Ada Limòn, but this is one of the first poems I wrote when I wanted to be like her: Sotano de las Golondrinas.
I swear this essay was going to be another edition of “My life in poets”, but in writing it I just wouldn’t shut up about my college library.
Our library could be described as Hogwartsian, complete with gothic gargoyles and secret staircases, built in stages haphazardly throughout the college’s history. Throughout my four years of servitude to academia, I kept finding new floors, back rooms and strange graffiti, and a couple of mysterious spaces that I never found again.
The library lent itself to the act of discovery. Throughout my years, I uncovered notes and artifacts in old books and academic journals everywhere I went. Once I found a typewritten recipe on graph paper inside a library book. It was a recipe for ginger cookies “in apology for making fun of your cape.” I still have it, somewhere, and I’ll scan it at some point. Here are a few other notes I found:
The year I first read Jack Gilbert, I wore a silver heart-shaped locket almost every day. I used to store tiny missives in its magnetized contours, little quotes and pieces from my reading to inspire me in my art and writing. I still have it. There is a fragment still there from those heady, awful days: a sliver of pastel paper with “the close exposure” written in my dense cursive. If I were to title the years of my life, that year would be called The Close Exposure.
I was pretty certifiably broken. I was in round two of a terrible relationship that was essentially a wire hanger for me to drape my neediness on. Already hypersensitive and damaged from the bombastic disintegration of my previous love, the emotionally abusive union served nicely to cement my tragic victimhood. I wrote in my journal, “I’ve been a little afraid to write in here, like if I start talking about what is going on in my head I will unearth some terrible sadness or uneasiness that will engulf me.”
Jack Gilbert didn’t save me. His poetry did, however, give me some tools for self-defense.
When you google Franz Wright, the top two autofill options are “Franz Wright poems” and “Franz Wright alcohol”, the implications of which are startlingly indicative of my relationship to his work. My finding Franz Wright can be credited to my first serious college relationship, and my first serious college relationship can be credited to alcohol. The latter was a mistake, the former turned out fairly well.
The first Franz Wright poem I read was “One Heart” from Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. It was that boyfriend’s favorite poem, and he read it to me once at about three in the morning after he walked me back from the library to our dorm. I was hazy from countless sleepless nights and our hands smelled like cigarettes. I remember I was wearing a skirt with holes in it and kept poking my fingers through the frayed fabric as he orated in the voice he used when he was acting—precise, technical, like he was checking off boxes. He emphasized the last stanza, the thank Yous. I paid little attention to the divine implications and got caught in the fleshy, human middle.
hi, new people. you have probably found me from thought catalog. thanks for liking my essay!
currently i predominantly use this for poetry, as you may have noticed. i’m looking to expand the content into some prose as well as essay pieces. that’ll be up in a few days/the future/when i stop procrastinating. in the meantime, here is another poem. it doesn’t really have a title yet.
When I was young IIt had been a strange feral summer, sloppy-
hearted and desperate, wielding whiskey like a reason,
blasting La Roux, pounding dust out of the carpets and roaring,
all of us together, this time baby! I’ll be! Bulletproof!
I danced like a sharp knife then walked home
sobbing so hard that the lights smeared yellow
and the night feigned day.
We spent that sallow season barefoot, feet blackened.
We had passed through two decades and came out brittle
and hungry, obsessed with the sour taste of our limitations, smelling
the hot breath of our endings behind us in the dark.
We turned the volume up.
Each night we danced, shaking
our sad skeletons, hurtling
our hearts through our bodies until they burst.
We unhinged our lungs and screamed, swearing
oh, this time, baby: a promise
so hollow you could press
your ear to its hopeless whorls and hear the sea.
I was having a drab grey clapboard visit,
all paltry duplexes and the horrible synthetic yowling of SE Powell until
the car ride and the keening music, the glint of the sun—
they breached my calcified chest and let the city rush in and well there,
where ecstatic loss filled my heart like high tide.
It was all so clear and sharp and I could see
the nascent shards of my pieced-together person embedded
in every intersection, the parts of me that were born and died here
in houses thick-hipped with porches, my life all
sweet melancholy bike rides and magnetic poetry on electrical boxes, every
insular enraptured beginning and crumpling moribund end. All of it—the roots bursting
through sidewalks, your fine-tipped profile and the bright stark trees—
It was a light under a door I will never open.
It was like the story you told me about the cavern in Mexico,
deep as the Empire State Building and how the swallows would gather
and descend together: a delirious plumy avalanche, filling
the cold and clammy darkness with the sound of wings.
We dragged Alice’s Christmas tree to the dead end
of 39th and lit it up. It was almost summer
and the pine burned bright as language.
After a quiet March, a slow blooming season,
our snug basement worlds were about to catch like brush fire.
The sun-bright violence came like a crowd of children, joyful and merciless,
it blasted us out of the soft yellow street lights that hid
our strangeness, our silhouettes suddenly puffy with windbreakers,
and we all stood a safe distance
from the tree and each other, holding our elbows and laughing,
each of us feeling a way we we had no words for.
