Five Poems
Jordan Anderson
Jordan Anderson
"Nocturne" James McNeill Whistler, Etching and drypoint,
printed in dark brown ink on fine laid paper, Plate: 7 7/8 × 11 1/2 in., 1879–80. Open source from The Met.
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le rêve américain
i want to immolate like antoinette:
crouching in burnished chamber, fervent, bridal
while commies storm the gate, howling their debt.
i’d thrash above black waters of cadets,
manicured fingers brandishing a bible,
until i drowned like mon cher antoinette.
for corrupt policy to circumvent,
i’d aim beneath pale petticoats a rifle
at traitors near the gate, wanting dragnet.
mouths forming breadlines a la soviet
(while i’d more shrewdly eat sweet sherry trifle,)
i want to choke like madam deficit.
in parlor window, adjusting pink aigrette
i’d take both shaky breath and teary eyeful
of migrants at the gate, shivering wet.
in ivory tower with sour sobriquet,
upon a hill as lofty as the eiffel,
i want to die like marie antoinette
with neighbors at my neck i’ve never met.
i want to immolate like antoinette:
crouching in burnished chamber, fervent, bridal
while commies storm the gate, howling their debt.
i’d thrash above black waters of cadets,
manicured fingers brandishing a bible,
until i drowned like mon cher antoinette.
for corrupt policy to circumvent,
i’d aim beneath pale petticoats a rifle
at traitors near the gate, wanting dragnet.
mouths forming breadlines a la soviet
(while i’d more shrewdly eat sweet sherry trifle,)
i want to choke like madam deficit.
in parlor window, adjusting pink aigrette
i’d take both shaky breath and teary eyeful
of migrants at the gate, shivering wet.
in ivory tower with sour sobriquet,
upon a hill as lofty as the eiffel,
i want to die like marie antoinette
with neighbors at my neck i’ve never met.
the tanned hide of an african makes the most enduring and the most pliable leather known to man
my skin is not any thicker than yours, i don’t think.
and when i skin my knee at recess in first grade,
nurse candy shouldn't dub my tears crocodile
and make me indignant. (later on i learn of licorice nibs
and lacrimal glands.) she is book-learned, and spares her ice pack
my unflinchingly thick skin of dead-dumb nerves.
my skin wouldn’t make very good leather, i don’t think, though it isn’t my area of expertise
but i do reckon that had nurse candy decided to dig her acrylics into the aperture of my patella
and peel, the fruit of the fleshing machine would not have upholstered her swivel chair
any better. my skin is not the scarlet letter of Ham
my skin is not as the jabuticaba, whose darkening bespeaks
a pliant willingness to be squashed, my body is not a beast’s
but it is in the image of God. and if you washed my feet
and watched the water warp my cells and prune
every branch that did not bear fruit, and if you lured
my radial artery to the apex of your lolling tongue
and expected a cool aurum but were met with the salt of pyrite,
and if you held up my arm to the sun and fixed your irises on my wrist’s radius,
you’d see the sun print of a snake’s shed skin, iridophoric glim; glimpse astris as she shimmered
her variegation up my vellus hairs, ensconced my hand in an evening glove sewn of menelaus’ left wings--
and you’d wonder, in all four-hundred-seventy ounces i’d shed, how much of me you’d missed.
my skin is not any thicker than yours, i don’t think.
and when i skin my knee at recess in first grade,
nurse candy shouldn't dub my tears crocodile
and make me indignant. (later on i learn of licorice nibs
and lacrimal glands.) she is book-learned, and spares her ice pack
my unflinchingly thick skin of dead-dumb nerves.
my skin wouldn’t make very good leather, i don’t think, though it isn’t my area of expertise
but i do reckon that had nurse candy decided to dig her acrylics into the aperture of my patella
and peel, the fruit of the fleshing machine would not have upholstered her swivel chair
any better. my skin is not the scarlet letter of Ham
my skin is not as the jabuticaba, whose darkening bespeaks
a pliant willingness to be squashed, my body is not a beast’s
but it is in the image of God. and if you washed my feet
and watched the water warp my cells and prune
every branch that did not bear fruit, and if you lured
my radial artery to the apex of your lolling tongue
and expected a cool aurum but were met with the salt of pyrite,
and if you held up my arm to the sun and fixed your irises on my wrist’s radius,
you’d see the sun print of a snake’s shed skin, iridophoric glim; glimpse astris as she shimmered
her variegation up my vellus hairs, ensconced my hand in an evening glove sewn of menelaus’ left wings--
and you’d wonder, in all four-hundred-seventy ounces i’d shed, how much of me you’d missed.
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kotatsu
in fall i build something to keep me warm: ikea table sandwiching patchwork of my uncharted fourth. i’m short two parts, but in the winter i’m more out than in and spend my wages huddling from frost in hot milk tea and polyester down. i want you to come by and sit with me-- but i’m afraid of ten too many volts singeing our four legs when they intertwine in january i keep my goosebumps under the covers-- for what’s there to do when you must warm the thing meant to heat you? |
"Ideas for Various Things of the Seasons" Hanzan (Matsukawa), woodblock printed books; ink on paper, 8 11/16 × 6 1/8 in., 1837. Open source from The Met.
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damsel
the prologue is here: if you lopped off the corners of this room, it would be perfect.
isn’t that funny? but seriously, this misplaced moat. crocodiles lick libidinous at my ankles
and i resolve my flesh to a shrinking bed.
i tell you not to let the bathtub burn. i tell you, with the serosanguinous ink of
a washable marker, to gerrymander your torment into
tomorrow.
can i rinse the folds of my brain in this static faucet? or would my consciousness curve into
an infant’s cartilage? is it self-harm if your cerebellum sinks into one dizzy mantra
foxglove, field mouse, fuckhead.
we set our stage in the stomach of ouroboros. home is a rope pulled through my one ear
and out the other, making mum the cornfed cluck of morning.
i walk tightrope,
and leave an ever-stirring wake. tuck tongueless my sinew, two-strand twist of lemon licorice
teacupped-- if porcelain’s not porous, how does it morass so
cthulhu? i can’t clean you up, i read,
bleach and ammonia and pneumonia. my mycophobia coughs a guillotine into a swamp
sinks to the bottom, diverticulum feter, maybe this is where i die!
a tabulation of a vicious cycle.
act two is lilliputians. they invade my fleecy afghan and tear from me each miniature pound of flesh without
remorse, making base in a best-barren apparatus. if i were good, i’d prey them back, and eat each as
são gabriel’s sauce. raspberry fun dip, babe.
but i am an unshaven coward, and each vellus twitch shakes acrid. i plot general
a kettle, raise a grocery bag named abjuration in an intimate embrace,
obviate their almost-fuschia ship,
run on balled feet to the concrete sand and
obfuscate in waste management my own
dumb obduration, fight or plight.
sit and cry. americans often get confused sedentary and sedimentary,
but how much difference is there, really? i swear, lying still i felt
medusa’s gaze on each sole cell, an apoptosis.
the epilogue is this: a girl won’t do well. whichever damned damsel’s dam lets loose
the un-serendipitous fallout of her fate has lost: her haloed irises are naught but the dented talisman
of a chisel, gone with the light.
the prologue is here: if you lopped off the corners of this room, it would be perfect.
isn’t that funny? but seriously, this misplaced moat. crocodiles lick libidinous at my ankles
and i resolve my flesh to a shrinking bed.
i tell you not to let the bathtub burn. i tell you, with the serosanguinous ink of
a washable marker, to gerrymander your torment into
tomorrow.
can i rinse the folds of my brain in this static faucet? or would my consciousness curve into
an infant’s cartilage? is it self-harm if your cerebellum sinks into one dizzy mantra
foxglove, field mouse, fuckhead.
we set our stage in the stomach of ouroboros. home is a rope pulled through my one ear
and out the other, making mum the cornfed cluck of morning.
i walk tightrope,
and leave an ever-stirring wake. tuck tongueless my sinew, two-strand twist of lemon licorice
teacupped-- if porcelain’s not porous, how does it morass so
cthulhu? i can’t clean you up, i read,
bleach and ammonia and pneumonia. my mycophobia coughs a guillotine into a swamp
sinks to the bottom, diverticulum feter, maybe this is where i die!
a tabulation of a vicious cycle.
act two is lilliputians. they invade my fleecy afghan and tear from me each miniature pound of flesh without
remorse, making base in a best-barren apparatus. if i were good, i’d prey them back, and eat each as
são gabriel’s sauce. raspberry fun dip, babe.
but i am an unshaven coward, and each vellus twitch shakes acrid. i plot general
a kettle, raise a grocery bag named abjuration in an intimate embrace,
obviate their almost-fuschia ship,
run on balled feet to the concrete sand and
obfuscate in waste management my own
dumb obduration, fight or plight.
sit and cry. americans often get confused sedentary and sedimentary,
but how much difference is there, really? i swear, lying still i felt
medusa’s gaze on each sole cell, an apoptosis.
the epilogue is this: a girl won’t do well. whichever damned damsel’s dam lets loose
the un-serendipitous fallout of her fate has lost: her haloed irises are naught but the dented talisman
of a chisel, gone with the light.
kid gloves
cut paper canvases classroom dyed construction red,
each zodiac a serrated system of half-organs.
factory standard doll not yet unboxed, inkjet-eyed,
don’t you take kid scissors to its hair to make it yours?
in the earth’s mantle, i chop off
your ponytail with a butcher knife,
bring the magma to your face
so you can see that destruction is natural;
when i take you over, i teach you a new language
full of holes, a crimson passion that oxidizes into rust
and you don’t forget it. when you open your mouth to foreign tourists
mars crumbles in your pharynx. you retch.
passion decorates the irises of a fireback
and stays there— eight thousand meters above, your oculi acuate,
free. there’s a growth beneath your cricoid cartilage
that you can’t cough up. so, c-section, free. you retch.
nurse needlepoint pricks a scarlet tattoo, i dissipate
with sunrise rays— tonight, you will dream of nothing but sky.
cut paper canvases classroom dyed construction red,
each zodiac a serrated system of half-organs.
factory standard doll not yet unboxed, inkjet-eyed,
don’t you take kid scissors to its hair to make it yours?
in the earth’s mantle, i chop off
your ponytail with a butcher knife,
bring the magma to your face
so you can see that destruction is natural;
when i take you over, i teach you a new language
full of holes, a crimson passion that oxidizes into rust
and you don’t forget it. when you open your mouth to foreign tourists
mars crumbles in your pharynx. you retch.
passion decorates the irises of a fireback
and stays there— eight thousand meters above, your oculi acuate,
free. there’s a growth beneath your cricoid cartilage
that you can’t cough up. so, c-section, free. you retch.
nurse needlepoint pricks a scarlet tattoo, i dissipate
with sunrise rays— tonight, you will dream of nothing but sky.
About the Author
Jordan Elizabeth Anderson is an Afro-Indigenous renaissance girl from Johns Creek, Georgia. A senior in high school, she enjoys designing clothes, reading about philosophy, and occasionally practicing cello. She began seriously writing poetry after a course at Columbia University in the summer of 2020.
About the Work
le rêve américain: "One of the central conflicts of my life is that my aesthetics are very bourgeoise, while I myself am a Marxist. So, I admire Marie Antoinette in a stylistic sense but not in a political one...although, this poem is not primarily about the French Revolution. I find the billionaires of today much less stylish, and I tried to elicit in this poem an impression that the elegance suggested by wealth is an incomplete one, something like a façade on a roof; it's built on something less elegant and more urgent."
the tanned hide of an african makes the most enduring and the most pliable leather known to man: "This poem is connected to a few of the myths about the black body that arose during the American slave trade. Many of them perpetuate themselves in slightly different ways in the present. Doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication to black people or believe black women about the extent to which they are experiencing pain; there's still that belief, no matter how subconscious it is now, that our nerves are less equipped to feel pain. I couldn't've recognized them then, but there were certainly moments of racism I experienced in my elementary school. I'd guess this moment with my school nurse was one of them."
kotatsu: "I had a sort of crush on this girl at my school when I first moved to New York. At the same time I was building this tiny kotatsu in my room, but I was working as well, and the things I ended up having to buy for a winter of a coldness for which I wasn't really prepared meant that I kept postponing purchasing the heater. A kotatsu is a sort of Japanese coffee table, with a quilt spread out around it and a heater underneath. So, I kept saying I'd invite this girl over to sit underneath it when it was finished, but I never ended up getting to."
damsel: "This is probably the most I've written of my traumatic experience, so I think the poem is tired. It's difficult not to cringe at it, because I find it dramatic...the only way I think it might have value is if someone else could find themselves in it."
kid gloves: "This poem was inspired by a moment in a book I read, Slavery Inc. by Lydia Cacho. She's a journalist uncovering sex trafficking rings all over the world, but there's one moment that really sticks with me in her report, and that's when she describes a girl at a safehouse whose meager English language knowledge is entirely sexual terms. In fact, most of the young girls at this house, at least at the beginning of their stays, act in an archetypically provocative way, because this is how they've been taught to behave as children. I wanted to think about the way these girls were taught, and the society that encouraged it."
Jordan Elizabeth Anderson is an Afro-Indigenous renaissance girl from Johns Creek, Georgia. A senior in high school, she enjoys designing clothes, reading about philosophy, and occasionally practicing cello. She began seriously writing poetry after a course at Columbia University in the summer of 2020.
About the Work
le rêve américain: "One of the central conflicts of my life is that my aesthetics are very bourgeoise, while I myself am a Marxist. So, I admire Marie Antoinette in a stylistic sense but not in a political one...although, this poem is not primarily about the French Revolution. I find the billionaires of today much less stylish, and I tried to elicit in this poem an impression that the elegance suggested by wealth is an incomplete one, something like a façade on a roof; it's built on something less elegant and more urgent."
the tanned hide of an african makes the most enduring and the most pliable leather known to man: "This poem is connected to a few of the myths about the black body that arose during the American slave trade. Many of them perpetuate themselves in slightly different ways in the present. Doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication to black people or believe black women about the extent to which they are experiencing pain; there's still that belief, no matter how subconscious it is now, that our nerves are less equipped to feel pain. I couldn't've recognized them then, but there were certainly moments of racism I experienced in my elementary school. I'd guess this moment with my school nurse was one of them."
kotatsu: "I had a sort of crush on this girl at my school when I first moved to New York. At the same time I was building this tiny kotatsu in my room, but I was working as well, and the things I ended up having to buy for a winter of a coldness for which I wasn't really prepared meant that I kept postponing purchasing the heater. A kotatsu is a sort of Japanese coffee table, with a quilt spread out around it and a heater underneath. So, I kept saying I'd invite this girl over to sit underneath it when it was finished, but I never ended up getting to."
damsel: "This is probably the most I've written of my traumatic experience, so I think the poem is tired. It's difficult not to cringe at it, because I find it dramatic...the only way I think it might have value is if someone else could find themselves in it."
kid gloves: "This poem was inspired by a moment in a book I read, Slavery Inc. by Lydia Cacho. She's a journalist uncovering sex trafficking rings all over the world, but there's one moment that really sticks with me in her report, and that's when she describes a girl at a safehouse whose meager English language knowledge is entirely sexual terms. In fact, most of the young girls at this house, at least at the beginning of their stays, act in an archetypically provocative way, because this is how they've been taught to behave as children. I wanted to think about the way these girls were taught, and the society that encouraged it."
