Don Share: This is the Poetry magazine podcast. I’m Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. 

Christina Pugh: I’m Christina Pugh, consulting editor. 

Lindsay Garbutt: And I’m Lindsay Garbutt, managing editor. This week we spoke with Jennifer Givhan about a poem in her newest manuscript, I Am Dark, I Am Forest. 

Jennifer Givhan: This new body of work just goes bravely into the dark trenches of the other world, of the dead world and the upside down. 

Don Share: The upside down is a reference to the television show Stranger Things. It’s a science fiction horror series depicting a mother’s attempt to save her child from an alternate dimension inhospitable to humans. 

Jennifer Givhan: It’s a mother going into those very, very dark spaces of our society, of ourselves, in order to pull out the poison from the wound and excise that which has kept her from being a truly realized self and allow her to mother in a much brighter and more hopeful world on the other side, when she returns.

Lindsay Garbutt: Givhan’s previous collection also explored the complexities of mothering. She says writing poetry shows us what we’re haunted by. 

Jennifer Givhan: I’m also considering how society comes into play, how mothering as a woman of color, mothering children of mixed race, mothering children as a single mother, mothering children through poverty, you know, all of the social issues that we’re dealing with in our current times. I’m able to take my haunting, that which I’ve written about before, and use it as fuel as I move forward with these poems in the new collection. 

Don Share: Here’s Jennifer Givhan reading “Headless Mama Returns (Xmas ‘18 Redux).” 

Jennifer Givhan: 

Rejoice in the snowflowers in the veins, rejoice in the bathtub
saltwater clogging the windpipe, its brittle sugar-

crystals in the lungs, in the petals blooming in the water
after curettage, scarlet rash of ornaments O globular berries staining

the porcelain. We pass the darkened library on the way
to my mother’s house so the kids can light advent candles—

I’ve strung Xmas lights to the wall with a Stranger
Things alphabet, Ouija to the upside down I’ll scry

I’ll scream to contact her—girl I heaved
into the toilet bowl, girl I let go each time a man

fucked me [over]. We pass the library past dark
& the librarians form a line under the exit at closing—I imagine

habits, I imagine knives for teeth, typewriters for hearts.
The librarians jackrabbit. They devour the dogs.

My children at my mother’s table love Jesus. The plants
in my mother’s kitchen still bloom on the sill

while my mother’s tongue wilts on my blue altar &
even Frida from her Santos candle glares in disapproval—

I’ve drowned them. The leaves blanch, a sick mucus,
a bulbous wax. A loaf of soggy bread around my belly &

thighs in the milky soapwater I scrub & scrub the pinkening
of poultry I’ve become. There was a hairbrush once, a broom’s

handle. There was a channeling in a tunnel, O burst O pop O clank
O fuck my swollen bell of  brain. If no candles light

when we scratch the match, has God forsaken? Where
have the librarians prowled off to—with their curses? Once upon

a time a mother lost her goddamn mind. I scrape the blackened foil
from the cake I’ve burnt O baby I carried to the ledge.

I’ve brought only the living ones to pray [for strength]
for when their mama hollows a wall, marrows a bone &

the headless girls return to her & the bodies rise like steam

from her chest & she flings her rust, her knives & uplifts
the blanket of ribcage to the cavernous tomb of sky.

Don Share: Well, the poem appears in our December issue and it’s a seasonal poem. And, I mean, I’m being serious that I think the work that mothers and women do during the holiday season is something that’s very hard to articulate and to get right and I feel that this poem really gets at something. I think that it sounds as if it runs counter to the spirit of the holidays, but I think it’s actually a very deep look at that. It’s a sort of a way of short-circuiting a lot of the silly stuff that we enjoy surrounding ourselves with in the holiday season and peering through to the marrow of the emotions and labors that so many people are obligated to contend with in what is really a—or can be a—difficult time in for families. 

Christina Pugh: Yeah. Wow. This poem is, there’s just so much going on. I mean, you’re so right. There’s sort of the opening rejoice that really makes you think of the season that it’s in. But then, there’s, you know, all this blood in the bath tub after curettage, which would be probably either a medical procedure of scraping the uterus, either after a miscarriage, or it could be an abortion, or it could be a procedure to remove something like a tumorous kind of growth. So, I mean, right away there’s just that clash, dramatic, almost phantasmagoric clash of these, you know, these opposites of rejoicing. And yet, this blood after this scraping out of the uterus, and I interpreted a lot of this as mourning unborn children for whatever reason, unborn children either because you know speaker has had abortions, has had miscarriages, has her period rather than giving birth to a child in that particular month or whatever. And the whole ritual set up around all of this for mourning and this going on during the time that the Christmas lights are strung up and all that is … it’s just really powerful and dramatic and you really feel transported to another realm of internal life. 

Lindsay Garbutt: It’s interesting that the quote unquote holidays are considered just from, you know, November through December, but I think of Halloween as just as much a part of the holidays and it’s definitely the beginning of that season. And so, the way that this poem kind of pokes at the violence underneath all of the holidays this time of year, the certain violence underneath the idea of Thanksgiving and then of course the religious holidays as well ... It’s all kind of there. And, as you were saying, it indicates that there’s also this sort of coming together of family which is inevitably a stressful time at the very least and, you know often, can be a violent time as well. In addition to sort of the transportation you were talking about Christina, I also feel like there’s a transformation happening in this poem. So, the poem sort of starts out with pure description, just describing a scene that we find ourselves in, and then we move into a speaker speaking from the first person, but the end of the poem switches to the third person. There’s a her and it’s the transformation of this speaker into the person, apparently a headless mama, who also has these headless girls, and then becomes a blanket of rib cage to the cavernous sky. And then you no longer know if she’s a mama at all, if she’s a person at all or what has become of her. The change of one year into another is kind of a time of transformation for the planet, but also for all of us, and the way that this poem makes that explicit and as dark and terrifying as it actually can be, I think is a really eye-opening poem. 

Don Share: Well, it has this great imaginative energy that reminds us that whether it’s sort of tabloid stories or science fiction kind of TV shows, that the alternate universe is our universe too, you know, like we really do live in that sort of alternate horror show ourselves. And that this poem is just like a direct conduit to that experience. And, you know, it’s sort of a frenetic depiction of that. It’s like sort of, it’s like losing your head or running around, you know, it has that kind of dizziness that is focused around a center point, which is, as Christina was describing, a kind of ghost, you know, the ghosts of a family, like the stories that aren’t completely there, but they’re sort of all around us anyway. That’s sort of that eerie feeling you can get this time of year. 

Lindsay Garbutt: Well, and it’s also, in addition to being ghostly, it’s also a very bodily horror in this poem, I think. Especially the point where the poem says “A loaf of soggy bread around my belly & / thighs in the milky soapwater I scrub & scrub the pinkening / of poultry I’ve become.” And then later this sort of knives and blanket of rib cage and bodies rising like steam. There’s this emphasis on all the food that we associate with the holidays as well. And so, the idea that her body has sort of become a food, a source of nourishment for, obviously, her children and her family, but it’s become almost a literal transformation into food and something, you know, almost terrifying.  

Christina Pugh: Yeah, it just seems so connected, you know, the violence, the eating, the scraping, because that’s what’s really, you know, kind of fascinating about this is that the speaker here is really clearly nourishing children at the same time that the speaker is seeing herself as someone who has, in a way, destroyed children. Who somehow either drowned them like the plants that she talks about, or, as she says earlier, “I’ll scream to contact her—girl I heaved / into the toilet bowl, girl I let go each time a man / fucked me [over].”  So, there’s a sense of being the bearer of food, but also somebody who is turning her back in a way on the unborn children. So, it’s kind of amazing in that way. I was thinking about Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Mother,” “Abortions will not let you forget.” In that poem, you know, we don’t really hear about any other children who weren’t aborted. Here there are children who are around and being taken to the mother’s house and, you know, there’s clearly an active sort of life. That speaker is living as a mother at the same time that she’s got that sort of violent self-blame, in a sense, about what’s happened. And I think poetry is really one place in which all of these complex feelings about the body, and especially the female body and what it’s capable of, and these issues around reproduction can really be expressed in all of their complexity.   

[MUSIC] 

Don Share: Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican American poet and novelist. Her most recent books are Rosa’s Einstein and Girl with Death Mask.  

Lindsay Garbutt: You can read “Headless Mama Returns (Xmas ‘18 Redux)” in the December 2019 Poetry magazine or online at poetrymagazine.org. 

Christina Pugh: We’ll have another episode for you next week or you can get all December episodes all at once in the full-length podcast on SoundCloud. 

Don Share: Let us know what you thought of this program. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, or if you listen another way, email us at [email protected] We’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Lindsay Garbutt: Are you thinking of buying someone a book for the holidays? Have you considered giving them one book every month for an entire year? We’ve got you covered. For a limited time, buy one subscription to Poetry magazine and gift one free. That’s two subscriptions for the price of one. Give the gift of poetry today. Go to poetrymagazine.org/podcastholiday. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastholiday. 

Don Share: Poetry magazine podcast is recorded by Ed Herrmann and produced by Rachel James.

Lindsay Garbutt: The theme music comes from the Claudia Quintet. I’m Lindsay Garbutt. 

Christina Pugh: I’m Christina Pugh. 

Don Share: And I’m Don Share. Thanks for listening.