Lana Hechtman Ayers makes her home in an Oregon coastal town of more cows than people. As managing editor at three small presses, she has shepherded over eighty poetry collections into print. She holds MFAs in Poetry and in Writing Popular Fiction, as well as degrees in Mathematics and Psychology. Her work appears in numerous print and online literary journals such as Rattle, The MacGuffin, and Peregrine, as well as in her nine poetry collections and a romantic time travel novel. Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.
Things You Will Learn About Me After It’s Too Late
In our terrifying times of overt misogyny now, a view of women’s history can serve us well. There are artifacts aplenty, and each is a symbol of a way of life and a world view. Beyond batik and blarney are rituals that are tied to self-sustenance and self-agency. Every culture that has women has women’s ways, sometimes hidden in hairdo, but nonetheless a ritual of feminine celebration.
Poetry has a well-established place in women’s history, and the ongoing efforts to suppress and marginalize women’s voices is endless evidence. Thus, offered to us as a new release is Donna Snyder’sAs Meaningful As Any Other (Gutter Snob 2022), a perfect bound volume in trade size; an illustrated volume, with a number of images by Tezozomoc. The book is structured in sections, and each section has an image as a frontispiece, with one being repeated on the cover. The images themselves are digital art, saturated and warm toned, that employ a collage of a human woman and symbols such as antlers, roots, and our planet. The sections of the work are also titled symbolically, using roots, auguries, flight, awakening and crossroads. Snyder has taken fragments from other of her work and uses these as an introduction to each section, such as a fragment entitled “woman smiles” that opens the second section “auguries”:
Woman smiles, her face starred, exotic birds tattooed around her mouth, beneath her eyes, around her nose […] (11) that squares off the reader with this vision of the Divine Feminine.
The poems here are perhaps also prayers, with both overt and subtle symbolism.The last section of this text, “Crossroads”, includes the poem “ Her blood, a faded ribbon” that whispers of the moment when menstruation ceases, “ Her blood faded/ only a ribbon covered with dust”(46), a moment notable in women’s lives but rarely overtly celebrated. If the poems here are rituals, then the rituals themselves often involve visiting art museums and reading other poets as well. However, there’s also mention of acts of intimacy, such as “this little rhyme that filled my head upon awakening” with the lovely line “my lips awash in the taste of your unbathed back” (32). This is writing that is as much an account of a life as a collection of correspondence, there’s a tone of a woman telling her confident of the desert and the desert city’s denizens.
Written in a hybrid of free verse and prose, these pieces seem to echo from the lineage from which they draw. The book’s last piece, “Fool’s Moon” opens with the line “The Fool’s Moon leads ineluctably to darkness” (53) which goes on the include a dancing ritual of:
Moon paints snakes on her face. Copper bells ring. She dances, peculiarly festooned, as if time really exists […]
While the Fool’s Moon is now a minimally celebrated event, occurring every 28 years, ritualized dancing is still very much entrenched in both women’s and the wider, western culture. And while some readers may be mystified at the symbolism employed by Snyder, the symbols are common to certain types of tarot cards. There’s a sense of a tarot reading in this work, the sections and the admonitions, prayers and reminders that prompt each piece. The draw that would encompass the evidence given here speaks to the full moon and meteor shower that read this work since its arrival as a book. While this may amuse, it would be wise for booksellers of tarot too to include this volume in their inventory. And while a tarot draw, or a tarot-style poem draw might maybe remind us of our celestial seasons, there are those who are comforted by history, by this quiet and ancient wisdom.
GAS Interview with Donna Snyder
Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.
Jefferson Carter has poems in such journals as Barrow Street, Cream City Review, Rattle, and New Poets of the American West. His eleventh collection, Birkenstock Blues, was released by Presa Press (Rockford, MI) in 2019 and may be ordered through his website: jeffersoncarterverse.com
Carter has lived in Tucson, AZ, since 1953 and taught composition and poetry writing full-time for 30 years at Pima Community College. Currently, he’s a passionate supporter of Sky Island Alliance, a regionally-based environmental organization.
LIFE PARTNER
For convenience, I & my life partner
(the woman formerly known as my wife) have numbered our arguments. Number 3,
you’re so negative. Number 8, you’re
naive. Number 11, another beer already?
Number 13, you don’t listen to me. But I do. I just don’t agree. Now
my life partner’s on the couch, watching
Live P.D. She’s pleased with the police,
so kind to the miscreants & trailer trash
they apprehend. Of course, they’re
kind! They’re on camera! Without
looking at me, she holds up three fingers.
My life partner wants to make a deal: she’ll stop storing our broken pepper mill upright in the spice rack, pepper everywhere
like coarse soot, she’ll store the mill
on its side if I stop switching off the light
over the dining-room table whenever
she’s in another room. Why? Why does she need that light on all day? She raises both fists & opens each one
John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016)and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
These poems, along with several hundred others, are part of a larger erasure collection entitled Pocatello Wildflower, which examines the words of a group of Idaho writers who worked primarily from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, including the late Bruce Embree, who really got the ball rolling in my head and heart, with a few still working today. It is my great hope that folks will be interested in the original writers work, in addition to my own. These pieces in particular were taken from the work of Kim Stafford. Pocatello Wildflower will be available in 2023 from Crisis Chronicles Press.
Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Of Rust and Glass, The Museum of Americana, and Quill and Parchment, among others.
Twenty-One “Women your age have decided/wars and the beat/of poems” --William Carlos Williams, “Suzy”
No one would ever mistake you for one of those waif- like models, those relics to be found on televisions and strip club stages, the “everyman's fantasy” every man is content to leave with the remote or at the door
Lebanese with a left turn at Ireland, short, strong, solid. A subterranean passageway that is also a foundation. You move and buildings tumble.
It is in your arms, tight around me, and deep in the pools of your eyes, the slight squint that comes along with every smile. It resonates in your voice, high as a jockey's, and just as athletic. It is in your paintings and your scars.
* * *
I draw you as the Acropolis upon the half-shell, the birth of redheaded Venus as done, say, by Rubens. No knee-length tresses to cover you, naked and wet from a dance in a thunderstorm, a trickle of seafoam against the inside of your thigh.
Those who gathered to watch stroke you with fans made from the petals of calla lilies, your curves brushed, aglow in white, red, purple.
* * *
The old saw states the scars are the beauty marks of a life lived, the badges of honor from distant wars.
A network thick as cables come together below and between your breasts.
What doctors may have taken is replaced now with the deep gunmetal grey of your eyes. I cannot but kiss your scars and call you beautiful.
The reader approaches a text, and there’s a relationship between them, a conversation between the voice of the text and the potential for resonance with the reader; however, not all texts are specifically representative of the author, personally. In the case of a memoir, the reader enters the text, and that relationship, with the notion that it is also the author’s life in the text, is somehow personal, if vicarious. Of late, readers have sometimes been given the sort of warning that’s seen in cinema; notifications of disturbing content. In Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir (Trembling Pillow 2022), the content warning also includes “Readers with photosensitive epilepsy should be aware that some of the linked videos (accessed through the QR codes) contain flashing lights”.Since not many texts contain QR codes, the reader is also alerted to the potential for a non-traditional format for the work overall. While the book proclaims itself a memoir, this is not a prose-only chronology, nor is the work overtly prose, as some pieces are stream-of-consciousness, some are narrative prose, others are narrative poems, including a piece titled “Narrative Poem” (81).
The work itself starts with a prologue that establishes the voice of the text as a Sibling Of A Disabled Person, but the structural arc of this prologue involves memory overall, makes overt allusion to Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” as an architecture for fragments that introduce character and setting. The prologue ends with a QR code. Thus, the reader is alerted to graphic elements in the text: the use of upper case, Selby-like run on sentencing, bold face, spatial elements and sometimes purely graphic use of the pound and asterisk keys. To their credit, the publisher includes these elements, but whether the use of a single old English font letter for the start of pieces is the editor’s or author’s decision as a helpful reading marker only adds to the subtle aesthetics of this work.
Such a work as this is as much meditation as memoir, memory filtered through the experiences of life. Lest the reader too readily dismiss the text as merely some post-punk hybrid, “Wordsworth Poem” begins with three paragraphs in a type of high-wire standard critical thought that then becomes a swan dive into memory. The transition here, debating Wordsworth’s
choice of poetic form, makes the observation “And form is a feeling/ // And form is a garment/ //
And in my mind, I return to the clothes” (23), peeks into the core structure of this work: each piece’s structure is chosen to clothe the thesis, the work is dressed in prose or QR codes, each episode has a Look.
These devices seem intended to a accentuate the physical deeds done in this work. In “Kids of The Black Hole, Part II”, which is presented as prose stanzas, the first stanza includes “He’s done it before. He’s hatch-marked his arms and shown me the scars” (35), one of the text’s many references to self-harm. The piece continues with “We’d kissed before. He’s asked me to blow him. I’s said no. I turned off the light. I don’t think I spoke”, but then continues as a meditation between trauma and art “It feels good and it hurts”. It is here that the repetitive use of wound in this work overall is given the thesis of “The wound is not real / // This, too, is perhaps a common sentiment for victims of abuse” (37). What the reader experiences is a clearly curated collection of violent memories at a rather gentle remove.
As a literary work, Cain’s book is energetic. The work has a distinctive auditory quality that makes it true to its contemporary copyright. And while the book overtly self-identifies as memoir, “This is still my confessional poem” (36) also seems traditionally apt. The reader in search of inspo-porn memoir will find few soft feelings here.The dozen or so small press zines that published these pieces prior to their collection here speaks to our current culture yen for such exposures of intimate darkness. It is then for each reader to depart the work in confrontation with their own landscape, be their experience one of horror or of catharsis.
Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)