And No One Else

Chanda Feldman’s “Money Tree” refers not to the omnipresent indoor plant but to a rarer backyard specimen, one marked by “the wound that made the basketball hoop: / a bicycle’s metal wheel gouged in the tree, / the trunk’s burred lip that clamps it.” Even as Feldman uses the language of injury (“wound,” “gouged,” “burred”), she describes the tree’s allure, the “shine to the bark.” Throughout the poem, she sprinkles words like “silver,” “aflicker,” “ashimmer,” and “glimmer,” whose assonance lends her lines a shimmer of their own. 

“Whose childhood monument is this?” she asks. “The adolescent // of the fluid leap and jump shot?… Who sought to make bank,” believing that money might grow on this particular tree? Any number of teens, she implies, might hope to “rise among the ordinals / to be ranked first, first, first.”  The repetition of “first” hints at the unlikelihood of the dream: no matter how many kids, in how many yards, might seek a “scarce grace” from a basketball hoop, only one person can truly be “first.” That disappointment will injure indeed.

 

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At the beginning of “Hatshepsut’s Beard,” the title character—who serves as regent for her infant nephew, the future Pharaoh of Egypt—contemplates facial hair. She’s in mourning for her father, and stores his artificial beard in a case near the baby’s crib. Once Hatshepsut sticks it on her chin, writes Joshua Sassoon Orol, “the tiny prince loved / to reach up and swat at it.”

That approval is crucial; she takes it “as her first sign of divine right.” After all, “advisors couldn’t argue / with the future king.” Hatshepsut’s male relatives have no bearing on royal decision-making: her father is dead, and her nephew is an infant. Yet her credibility depends on the baby’s acceptance of her father’s symbol.

Meanwhile, artists carve her image “with long eyelashes     small breasts / no hint of glue on high cheeks or jaw.” In the sculptors’ vision, Hatshepsut fuses with the beard, becoming a composite creature, at once female and bearded. Orol’s title reflects a similar consolidation: it implies that “Hatshepsut’s Beard” belongs to her, and to no one else.

 

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“Sometimes I pronounce aubade: obeyed,” writes torrin a. greathouse in “Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs.” The poem yokes together discrete words and meanings. “Prey,” for instance, turns into “prayer,” and lovers who say they “adore me” mean instead “they saw / in me a door,” a mere “thing to be entered.” “This particular desire stumbles / the tongue,” writes greathouse, hinting not just that it’s difficult to discuss, but also that it invites tricks of language.

Mulling that “particular desire”—for an erotic form of bondage and discipline—greathouse notes that “to lash can mean / both beat & bind,” to “cuff / can also mean to hold or harm.” Perhaps this analysis suggests truths applicable to love more generally. Relationships can at once beat and bind us, hold and harm us; these possibilities coexist as intimately as lovers.

 

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In “Endosymbiosis,” one symbiotic organism lives within another. Paul Tran’s poem of that title asserts that it “wasn’t him / but what he did / that lived on // inside me.” This unnamed aggression haunts the speaker, who must “cleave action / from figure, // the verb do / from the noun doll.” They must, in other words, distinguish the behavior from its perpetrator. Just as importantly, they must distinguish perpetrator from survivor: “two bodies / side by side,” Tran writes, are not “two mirrors / facing // each other.”

“Action figure” and “doll” bring to mind helpless, lifeless creatures, but Tran’s emphasis on “action” and “do” challenges that implication of weakness. Through language, the speaker seizes control. They imagine the double “l” of “doll” as a “road / through // Hell”—a road that, even as it led them into suffering, will lead them out again.