Peeling an Apple Without an I

On February 8, I arrived an hour late for the Bad Mouth reading here in Albuquerque. Good luck can result from one of my memory lapses. In this case, Jenny George, who stepped up to the mike shortly after my arrival and read from After Image, a new collection—one stunning poem after another. The reading included a couple of poems with the same title: “Jenny George.” These open with accusatory declarations. “Jenny George is a failure,” says one. And another: “Jenny George is not to be trusted.” From first line to last, I love the wry, self-deprecatory tone of these self-titled poems. Here’s one:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Jenny George    Is not to be trusted. She will tell you  The soul narrows until it is just the breath.  She will call it a violent narrowing.  But her words are just images gleaned  off a dying girl like an apple peel  pared in a slow spiral off an apple.  She herself has never passed through  that hollow reed. An unreliable narrator  they used to call it in the seminars.    There are things you simply can’t know  until you have lived through them.    At any rate, strangers now wear the girl’s clothes  on the streets—the very streets  she and Jenny George would walk  with ice creams melting over their hands.  Or while a slew of blossoms  gusted suddenly through that corridor.    You might see a red dress crossing  in the crosswalk. The hem of it billowing.      Jenny George    After Image: poems (Copper Canyon Press 2024)

The poems of After Image are meditations on grief. They observe. They itemize. In this one, the poet steps back, using third-person point of view to look at loss as a phenomenon that happens to someone else. There is a blunt power that comes of cutting the I out of the poem: “her words are just images gleaned / off a dying girl like an apple peel / pared in a slow spiral off an apple.” I can’t vouch for George’s intention here, but in the paring image I see the superstition that if you peel an apple in a single motion and throw the peel over your shoulder, the peel will land spelling the name of your future love. These are poems about losing that person. The most important person. The one you love.

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“Jenny George” moves on to further surprise. The deceased lover’s clothes have been given away, have appeared in the street where she walked with the poet, eating ice cream “while a slew of blossoms / gusted suddenly”—slew meaning many, meaning a murder of.

George’s closing couplet echoes the earlier mention of her deceased love’s clothing, worn by others now, in public:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  You might see a red dress crossing  in the crosswalk. The hem of it billowing.

A skirt hem billows from the movement of air, billows like breath, like a departed love’s breath.

About the Author:

After Image is Jenny George’s second poetry collection; her first is The Dream of Reason. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

After Image is available here ⇒

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