“Yet,” by Alisha Dietzman

I’ve always liked thinking that sin isn’t really that sinful in the eyes of God, because when I sin, I’m conscious of God. God’s on my mind. I’m disobeying “Him.” Like in Alisha Dietzman‘s poem, “Yet,” there’s what she’s doing to God, and what she’d do so her body was the right body for God. Like is it really a sin to imagine feeding God to sharks if their God-given instincts won’t really go for it? I don’t know. I know there’s a test here, though, for the relationship between instinct and action, at least for the sharks. Or that’s what the poem’s ca-clunk poetic shift from one statement to the next would lead me to believe. The body is what God gave the world’s creatures. And in the body is instinct. And in human instinct is shame.

Not that the poem is preaching. Dietzman is intentional with each statement. But how one statement might connect to the next isn’t necessarily spelled out. The poem feels like riding in an MG convertible, with its manual transmission. How there’s often this gap between statements, where the poem coasts through to the next statement, like the car would coast up to the next gear. In the beginning of the poem, God speaks in the tone of voice a person uses when they’re addressing their animals. Something that might show how God loves animals, even the shark. But when the poet proposes to feed God’s body to the sharks, it’s not immediately explained why the sharks lack interest. Maybe as sharks, God speaks to them most gently through their blood lust. That instinct most deeply rooted in their bodies.

It’s like a device that lets Dietzman effectively round the corner from one idea to the next.

31.  I wander over bodies in my mind. I am bored
by even the word bodies—
they are,

32.  and longsuffering, sweetish.
Perhaps best described as small towns

The shift from dismissively imagining bodies to seeing them in their most humanistic suffering and sweetish qualities. To then identifying them as a kind of “small town.” It’s a process of thought where she’s always zipping ahead of me to address the next implication. Like those Spy vs Spy cartoons, when the beak-nosed opponent is always a step and a half ahead. Dietzman is thinking of gently addressing our most beloved animals, guiding God to gently addressing sharks, then after seeing the body as a small town, she envisions the shameful pieces of herself for having imagined this fate for God.

Or at least the poem’s explicit concern with shame leads me to various considerations relating the body to shame (which the last third of the poem is especially concerned with). Is shame human instinct? Is instinct an insular conversation the body is having at the self? Would it be best to read this poem as a prayer if it were in the form of a movie? Where the movie form is so much the mode for her book, Sweet Movie. Understanding the consciousness experienced with movies. And discovering this kind of consciousness will only happen in poems.

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