Shivanee Ramlochan's Blog, page 2
August 28, 2018
“Pollen” – Rose Lemberg
Image: Three’s a crowd., posted at Flickr by Naveen Lakshmanareddy under a Creative Commons License.
What you send into space may yet await you, its compassionate tendrils ready to pet your face.
Rose Lemberg’s “Pollen” is a microcosm of a much larger story. This is how some of the best poems situate themselves: they focus on the minor wars unfolding on the tip of your eyelash. For the beings living there, the war isn’t minor. Nothing feels small about the world that greets us here, where a n...
August 24, 2018
“An Ethnography of White Men by the Goddess Kali” – Maya Mackrandilal
Image: Goddess Kali, posted at Wikimedia Commons by Piyal Kundu (পিযাল কুণডু) under a Creative Commons License.
You don’t see the Goddess coming til her foot’s on your throat.
Maya Mackrandilal’s “An Ethnography of White Men by the Goddess Kali” sings right into my Hindu-heathenish soul. A poem in five increasingly bloody movements, the narrative unthreads Kali’s unsavoury encounters with men who seem determined to misunderstand her. Oh, they mean well. Don’t they almost always mean well, the...
“Ciguapa” – Mario Ariza
Image: Yellow feathers, posted at Flickr by Claire Dickson under a Creative Commons License.
The difference between what is horrendous and what is beautiful is only the defect of our own eyes, not what we regard.
In Mario Ariza’s “Ciguapa”, a woman offers cocaine, then tells her listener a story. The ciguapa is the character beneath the folkloric mat, revealed for tongue-dusting. Nocturnal, mountain-dwelling, with feet turned backwards, Dominican ciguapas make me hearken to Trinidadian douens...
August 23, 2018
“No Poisoned Comb” – Amal El-Mohtar
Image: Core values, posted at Flickr by genericavatar under a Creative Commons License.
What we call wicked in a stepmother might be only the tip of the poisoned dagger.
Amal El-Mohtar’s “No Poisoned Comb” is a subversion of fairytale that, mid-twist, turns the knife deeper into the rosy red core of what you think you know. We hear the testimony of the Evil Queen of Snow White, who tells us we’ve got the original tale all tangled up. She’s convivial about this mangling of history: “I bear no...
August 21, 2018
“Sealskinned, Crowned” – Hester J. Rook
Image: Don’t breathe, posted at Flickr by Petra Hromádková under a Creative Commons License.
We move from skin to skin, sloughing ourselves in the pursuit of something resilient and strange.
That human beings crawl out of skins is no foreign concept to folk of the Caribbean. So too for the mythos at the heart of Hester J. Rook’s “Sealskinned, Crowned”, which immediately conjures associations of selkie culture. The poem’s speaker, who describes their skin as “misshapen from disuse / stretched...
August 20, 2018
“After Selling Your Soul to the Trickster God” – Sara Norja
Image: Bonfire, posted at Flickr by Lee Haywood under a Creative Commons License.
How close do you dare hold your feet to the fire, if you’ve already paid a ransom for your stride?
“After Selling Your Soul to the Trickster God” by Sara Norja is a segment of time, cleaved from the orange of the world, held to the reader’s gaze for an object lesson in payment, in consequence. The poem’s speaker has done precisely what the title says: a bargain has been met. The contract is already drawn up, and...
August 19, 2018
“All Hallows” – Louise Glück
Image: Muertos_1989, posted at Flickr by Omar Bárcena under a Creative Commons License.
Who sits with you at the table for supper? Whose hand, when you are weary, lifts the soup spoon to your mouth?
Louise Glück’s “All Hallows”: it doesn’t get more sublime, or more terrifying. If you know your horror, you’ll know it’s the speculative unfurling that steals your sleep, far more than the manic clown’s face dripping with blood. The blood in this poem is hidden: it sits under the skin, patient and...
