Review of Su Zi's DANKE by Jonathan Fletcher

Danke

Su Zi

Ethel Zine and Micro Press

2024

49 pgs.

$10

“Darkest moon cycle: / ritual of dawn and dusk, / wet wind bends dry grass. . .” (Su Zi 3). And so begins Su Zi’s Danke (2024), a chapbook-length poem in quatrains.  Though small in dimensions, relatively short in word count, Danke is anything but lean in subtext, diction, meaning, or description.  Within the compact pages, each rich in detail, crows summon mornings, moons melt, and a horse “allows a long embrace” (ibid. 18).  Though full of such unique and skillful instances of anthropomorphism, Danke does much more than lend nonhuman characters human attributes; it invites the reader into an environment too often (and equally sadly) foreign to a modern reader. 

 

As if aware of the cultural divide between such a reader and the pastoral, the speaker addresses Red Woman, presumably one of a handful of equine characters, at various points in the chapbook.  In such intimate moments, however, the reader gets the sense that the speaker is gesturing toward them as much as the horse, and maybe even the author herself. In such moments, too, the speaker nearly (and implicitly) bemoans the tragic and irrevocable separation of humanity from its primal habitat while also (and equally fervently) celebrating, even ennobling, the nonhuman characters and their georgic environment.  Su Zi’s choice of capitalization of the common names of the various animals (e.g. Mourning Dove, Cardinal, and Warbler) only lends further support for such an interpretation.

In Danke, Su Zi wisely eschews ornate language for plainer (though not plain) diction.  Though not exactly minimalist in nature, Su Zi’s descriptions are simple (though not simplistic) in syntactical construction.  Take, for example, the following quatrain: “never forgetting / hungry years, palomino now learns gentleness. / following difficult steps / those of a beloved ghost” (ibid. 7).  Or, to take another example: “grass is burnt with frost / yet my red sister searches / for sleeping green roots / disinterested in grain / it seems she dreams of sweetness” (ibid. 31). Or, yet another example: “these simple moments: / cranes come to peck corn and dance, / sun sweetens damp air / so Sister Mare cleans all seeds, strolls soft-eyed in golden light” (ibid. 35).  Though arguably quiet and reflective, Su Zi’s minimal language emotionally charges such otherwise interior moments.  Though neither metered nor rhymed, Danke operates with an informal rhythm.  It operates with alliteration and assonance (“awful arctic air” being an example of the former,” “flit of the left oat” an example of the latter) (ibid. 23, 21).  It operates with anaphora: “this moment’s wet wind / this moment’s intimacy / this forever in the now” (ibid. 19).  Though never overwhelmed by such conventional poetic devices, Danke allows for just enough and, in doing, so not only informs and enlightens the reader but transforms them.

Although Su Zi’s chapbook-length poem is indeed a quick read, it is one that stays with the reader long after.  It is one that begs for a reread. Several, in fact. Don’t pass up this literary revelation. Pick up Su Zi’s chapbook today, and let it settle within you. Let it rumble.  Let it rise.  You won’t be disappointed.

Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025.  Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.

GAS Featured Poet: Mahdi Meshkatee

 

Mahdi Meshkatee is a UK-born, Iranian poet, author, and artist. His translation of the children’s novel Witch Wars by Sibéal Pounder has been published by Golazin Publication Company. His work has been published by a number of magazines, including October Hill Magazine, Nude Bruce Review, and Inscape Magazine. His writings are a continuity of attempts at decoding himself. Instagram: @Mahdimeshkatee  Linkedin: Mahdi Meshkatee

I Missed a Key

 

The stains on the page are your tears.

(you haven’t shed them yet)

 

Last night in the great theater hall

The crowd gave me a huge standing ovation

An encomium I deserved after years of struggle

To be able to express myself. They cheered me on as I approached

The grand black piano at the center of stage, 

spotlight on me without being afraid

To lose for the second time in my life, the first the time I committed

Suicide but it went wrong, and I stayed alive.

 

I began with a piece from Schubert, Romantic

Challenging and shattering the ways of the world.

Then I moved on to Beethoven, some were intoxicated enough

To dance seated, and then stand up to elevate their movements

Rising and falling inaccurately on notes high and low.

I registered the moment into my brain, imagined myself dancing along

Hands up, feet moving on the ground as I was taught

When I was only eighteen and my sister brought me a drink

And from there it only took two to make us jump to the dance floor

Bodies expressing themselves after years of being told

To be careful not to show much, to keep close, to always consider

The worst outcome possible, and grow concerned, conservative and cautious

So much so that liberty becomes a distant notion and not so palpable

As for you to reach your hand out and grasp it.

 

The music flows, crescendos and diminuendos, ends, dins rise, noise floats over

The people happy with who they were, and happier with who they are, now,

In illusion as to the divisible nature of time

That there exists a time past present future

As if Schubert died like Beethoven died like Mozart died like me

When my piano broke and my key was stuck 

In the lock

And nobody came 

Not even my mom

To open the door

I sat behind

Crying 

For so long

until I was twenty-five

And dad came home

Groceries at hand and

Silently opened the door

To the same increment of time.

Sadness Shouldn’t Be Buried

 

Sadness shouldn’t be buried in a graveyard

 

It shouldn’t be buried next to the cashier 

Who celebrated his 60^th birthday as 

A loving husband and papa.

 

It shouldn’t be buried next to the child

Who was drowned in a frozen lake

‘fore blowing a birthday cake.

 

It shouldn’t be buried next to the writer

Who was soon going to be published

And missed the right train.

 

Sadness should be felt, written about, cried over, lamented, reminisced, performed, lied, feigned, promised, maimed, mocked, longed, wanted, desired, haunted, gone, afloat, 

in the air, 

not in the 

ground,

Where the dead lie.

GAS Featured Poet: Ron Riekki

 

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize.  Right now, Riekki's listening to Gary Jules' "Mad World."

When I worked in the prison, it reminded me of the military

 

and the military reminded me of being an EMT and when

I was on the ambulance there were all these cities that were

buzzing by—Orlando and Los Angeles and Detroit and

San Francisco—and they all looked the same, the exact

goddamn same with those median strips flashing like

urban Morse Code, and the stroke patient punched me,

 

and in boot camp it was the same, the suicides so quick

and subtle, like blinking, and the prison was the same,

with the inmates stabbing themselves in hopes of getting

put on an ambulance to escape to the hospital, which was

better than the prison, with nurses in nursing uniforms and

football games on waiting room TVs and I remember all

 

the barbed wire of the prisons and all the barbed wire on

our bases, how I had to pick dead rabbits out of them, how

that was my job for weeks, a punishment for existing, and

I remember one day when the rain was light and I sat there

in uniform with a war going on and I was nowhere near it

and I opened my mouth and caught the rain and I loved it.

 

I once got to play the title character in a horror film

 

and I remember a scene where I was dragging this girl

through a swamp and the director would yell ‘cut’ and

I’d bend over to try to help her up and she’d say ‘no’

and lift herself up and we’d walk back to ‘square one,’

the starting point where we’d wait to see if the director

 

wanted us to do it again and he did, so she’d lie down

on the ground and I’d wrap my hand around her fake

hair and she’d grab my wrists so that I wasn’t actually

pulling her by her hair, but she was hanging onto me,

and the ground was wet from a recent rain and it was

 

February in North Carolina, at night, cold, and all she

wore was underwear and I’d drag her again and when

we got to the point where he yelled ‘cut,’ I’d try and

help her up, but again, she’d say ‘no,’ angry that I’d

even try and we’d walk back to square one and do it

 

again, and I wondered why she’d always say ‘no,’ but

later, when I saw the film, and she’d go on to win best

actress and I’d go on to win nothing, I realized that she

needed to hate me in the film and she needed to hate me

the whole time, not turn it off and on like a light switch

 

and when I thought I was dragging her through swamp,

it was really her that was dragging me, that I wasn’t an

actor at that level, that she was so entirely immersed

that she only saw me as monster, and even later, when

we were back in the hotel, she wouldn’t even look at

 

me, and I went to bed and I felt bad, almost like I was

guilty of something.  And maybe I was.  Maybe it was

all of patriarchy in those moments.  Maybe I was just

an amateur.  Maybe I didn’t understand Method.  May-

be she didn’t want to be in a horror film, but wanted

 

to be doing something that would earn her an Oscar.

I don’t know.  I’d lie in bed and realize that the next

day I was going to kill her.  And I didn’t want to kill

her.  I wanted to be the good guy in the film.  Later,

on the final day of filming, I talked to the actor who

 

played the good guy.  He was kind of famous.  Was

on a TV show I didn’t watch very often.  I said some-

thing about how it sucks to be the villain; his eyes lit

up, almost in anger.  He said he had the boring role.

All he did was look good and say clichés.  He said

 

that if I was going to be a killer in a movie, I had

layers upon layers I needed to explore.  He said if

he had my role, he would have went to the nearby

prisons, would have tried to meet the Death Row

guys.  I felt stupid.  He looked like a supermodel.

 

His cheeks were all empty.  His forehead was an

entire career.  I had to kill him at the end.  When

I did it, I sort of enjoyed it.  It was my best scene

in the film.  He looked like nobody had said ‘no’

to him in his entire life.  I got it right on the first

 

take.  The director yelled ‘cut.’  We disappeared

from each other’s lives.  We were brilliant.  We

were young.  We didn’t go on to do great things.

We just disappeared.  Maybe that’s what we all

did so well.  We were incredible at disappearing.

 

 

 I’m afraid of my mother, I’m afraid to lose her

 

but there is nothing you can control

in this life.  She told me one time

about how much she loves sneaking

 

off to the softball field in our home-

town.  Back then, there was only 3

channels on television.  Back then,

 

there was so little to do.  The soft-

ball games would be packed.  All

these residents from all over town

 

would come, line the fence.  It was

glorious.  You felt as if you were

at a Presidential inauguration.  All

 

this air just puzzling with buzzing

and fizzing and guzzling with sheer

hope and rage and skill and lust.

 

I felt like the world would explode

at those times.  But my mother

would go when it was empty,

 

when the games were over, and

it was just quiet and mosquitoes

and stars, and she’d go with her

 

best friend and they’d smoke and

eat oranges and she said nothing

felt better in the world to her than

 

nicotine and oranges, that they

went together like Heaven and

God.  And she told me that and

 

it stuck with me.  And she’s quiet

now and tells me she has trouble

thinking and I get quiet too, afraid

 

I will lose her.  And I will.  Because

the world is beautiful and cruel . . .

 

 

GAS Featured Poet: Mark DuCharme

Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Here, Which Is Also a Place, was published in 2022 by Unlikely Books.  That same year, his chapbook Scorpion Letters was published by Ethel.  Other recent publications include his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, published by The Operating System. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Report

                                for Nik Arnoldi

The report isn’t worth songbirds

Who line the nude amphitheater

Whenever field mice play

The zither with a maddening tongue

That can only be attributed to frog populations in

Upper-Lower Tennessee

Where we once snorkeled

In love with the field mice there

Who scoffed at our youthful schadenfreude

At the pleasure that we took in being near the sea

Where death is a birth hostel

& It’s known that bats enliven plants

By thrifty locution

Of which these psalms are just one more

Deteriorating example

So begins the urtext of a quiet walk on the beach

Where hummingbirds balk at zesty consiglieri

Thrust out of windows at important motels

Stealing lemons with a spiffy rejoinder

That none of our grandfathers ever even sang

O lemon box, lemon box, lemon box!

It’s true, I eat dungarees

& Paint the wind blue

But still, you shouldn’t follow me to that icy motel

Unto which I’ll soon heave

Buckets of shovels & jewels

For the dereliction of the newly homed

Call me Jimbo

My dissertation is on mass murder in post-American speech

In a Memphis you’ve already heard

Declare birth frozen

A clarion call of rusted eggshells

That you fire up in mea culpa speech, grinding down

Like laminated wasps

Until I eat paper

Or swell, an inspector general on the lam

Yes, I believe I can get you some

Just don’t call again

Until you weep

At guns’ savage paint

Of What Fence Is This Nuance?

Land vast like life

A frog misprision

Expletive unknown distance

Out of date once, stoppered plenty

A plenary ash to false zero

In the hurt brought to wrong here

Hymns of plenty

Awake vacant fuel

Like a list of bugs

The birth of an oddball for sure

In breath of riverine sentences

Who decide what you feel

By crowd’s distant memory

Of a thing you wore a dozen times before

Sing, in tangible mention

What you don’t offer, you also don’t reveal

Sing, like something’s very wrong

In a tune of birth sugar

Of thirst, until you wear

The time with flowers printed

Who cranked up the breakaway dancers?

Songs are a wind of paint

Behold the hump-fisted businessman

Magically consoled

In song’s winnowing haste

Thank you for the cares we’ve flamed

Like a signal or furtive calm

A rally of every

Love ever made

Forsythia with Bird Attached

Do songs make breath illegal

In the hilt of the fire of the door?

As a child, I befriended an ostrich

With kind eyes. The moon slumped knowingly.

Other agents blustered at the doldrums. It was noon in

Cincinnati, & I coughed pert dictums,

Monkey psalms in breath of splay. Inelegant sidewinder addenda.

The feral puzzler chinked as we all grieved.

Birds rustled far away. If you make time for the glint of

Angular days, what strangled mention

Does wildness keen? What variance

Is suggested by the newels of your jugged hems?

Are we vested with the commonplace which only silence understands?

Awake tune in a birth riddle.

Bury love at striking. Once, you held

Linnets at a fledge of distance that rocks could not command.

Lonely as a fragrance, a trace:

Skein, mask, paper. The color of the the chapbook’s cover

Seeming to invite wine to be spilled on it. A husk of jewels

Standing in a cask of yo-yo agreement. The lamp is down, to unearth these letters

Cold moons will not divide.

If the moon is strung in sentences,

Would you feel denatured? Perhaps, as geophysical boundaries

Are also parts of grief.

& I, who are next to you, as coffins & profiles

Through which we hint at darker matter, swerving.

We have decided to render thought anew, for example,

In its thick, natural raveling

Which, like birth, holds no hint of plot,

A scheme of numbers & variables that no one seems to want to hide.

By the way, I don’t mean to backtrack, but

Gramaryes hold the thought of winter in the death of sunless trees,

At horizons where death’s outweighed by the speed of numbers & bees

That I don’t dare repeat with the lights on.

Had I known you, I would have phoned

In fritillary homes that were not bombed recently.

Think of death as a variable. Evade

Plant guardians who rarely phone,

Though like you, I crave broken recitals—

The stuff of ear & bone.

An Autodidact Goes to the Riverbank for Tea

Samples in the breath trouble

Reveal your intimate name to geese, who look on, disinterestedly,

Stoking the season’s terrible pants.

“Whom have I come to fulfill, then, & what

Denials should I issue them?” Whether falling down in paint

Or a filmed state of rushing, notice

Portents in the breath I found. The eye

Is unverified. It’s having ‘film trouble’

In the glossy trees. When you dabble

In a lore of forlorn saints, be wise, be free,

Brutish as a primitive archivist housewife

With great burnt-out trucks. The devil smiles here,

At an instant of cloud memory, for he knows

There are no chickens, but that hide

In lustrous shadows

Awaiting moon’s instruction. A critical mass of bolt theory

Fails to enliven the hovel of your smile. Grace notes of the miserly, libertine

Zealots draw out the penances of fool

Hummers, twice removed,

Who sell breath like a song they made.

The corporate handler smiles, in gentle lockdown.

“Let’s do lunch like an urn of grapes,” he purrs.

Plastic is the keynote of the speech of haunted men

Who hold no ladders while the moon hides

Woefully, behind her cloud. This is not to say that speech

Isn’t performative, at times, if you’re still looked after

With only seconds left

To hide.

Ode

If I am a vehicle,

Where’s your mouth? Who sells fruit in winter?

Was Rimbaud frightened of his own speech?

Need we be frightened too

In an era of already normalized stifling?

The heat-birds are shifting to nowhere

Normal like the birth the sun implodes,

Like yesterday’s blue paint landfills,

A hem where the sun doesn’t cry out, or try.

If you try to be drenched, be landfills of once before.

Consult bird voices

In guns’ savage paint

Then awaken a euphony heap of throngs or ukuleles

Toward whom the best kisses haven’t even begun

In an era of calm rosaries

& Chalk-painted consultants

Lest we swoon, or starve

Under cold boardwalks, with noon’s violence grazing

That the moon would still not grace, or glance

With a kiss, except for other lovers, now defiled.

But I wake to you, in your lost sense of time’s elegance

At least until your sense of birth comes free

As what we thought was truth— a lucky try

Now, at breath’s elegance. Knowledge is friable,

Kissed by checked-out rock stars (are there any rock stars left?).

Then all is paper?

Or the stuff of paper-ish houses, in the holy birth city’s

Glass factories? Obey your dumbness.

What else is left, but ashcans in the triggered

Birth of fading houses, with breath no longer free?