Month: September 2024
Borderlines
by Chiwenite Onyekwelu
When I dream about poetry I dream about it in borderlines. For example. Instead of moonlight, I say Luz de la luna & watch the Spanish sing. In another dream, I’m running because the country I call home has been set on fire. At the Immigration someone says, No pigs & I imagine a dancefloor in Lagos. Like everyone I’m half drunk & I’m swirling around with my jeweled feet. I say, could you imagine Emi elede & they laugh because here, I fit in. Because here the music the music. In yet another dream, there’s no word for pig, so he says Svaagat meaning welcome meaning feel safe. Somewhere in his throat, a light. Language is such a personal thing. Like orgasm. Or like that other dream, where– astonished–an American screams Holy cow so I try to poetize it in Bangladesh: tsarki sani. Language is a personal thing. Otherwise tell me why, despite where I look, a holy cow is more funny than fuss. I imagine its chubby neck, the prayer beads around its wrist, imagine it moos during devotion & kneels to its own vegan god. There are nights all I ask for is a dream breathtaking as this. Let the poems enter me, peel me open like coneflowers in summer light. & if not the poem then the beaded cow within the poem.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, is forthcoming in Red Bird Chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Adroit Journal, Terrain.org, Frontier, Palette, Chestnut Review, ONLY POEMS, Ubwali Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2024 Idumaese Alao Prize for Literature. In 2023, he won the Hudson Review’s Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for both the Writivism Poetry Prize as well as the Alpine Fellowship Prize for Poetry. Chiwenite has a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. He’s on Twitter as @Chiwenite_O
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Borderlines”? For a long time, I had an uptight notion of poetry. I saw it as a genre of literature only. However, I now understand that before its aesthetic utilities, poetry is first a means by which poets communicate their thoughts. “Borderlines” was my attempt at showing this. In writing Borderlines, I did not want a poem that aims, advocates, or desires; I just wanted a poem that exists. The expressions in the piece (like holy cow, a man calling another man Pig, the dancefloor in Lagos; etc) are things we hear and experience in our different societies. All I did was bring them together and say: Look, there is poetry even in our most ordinary affairs. Also, former Young People’s Laureate for London, Theresa Lola, once described her writing style as spontaneous. Often, we impose a predetermined path on a poem, rather than letting the poem lead the way. Lola’s technique was helpful to me in avoiding this. I didn’t think about the lines. I just wrote them roughly as they to my mind. For me, therefore, the most fascinating thing about Borderlines is its spontaneity. In addition to this, I love the humor– even more humorous is the fact that the humor was unplanned. I love that the poem surprises me with each twist, each ordinary twist. by Rae Gouirand I stepped on the bird fully conscious I was stepping on the bird. Whether it had fallen with a falling tree and been stunned, drowned with an injured wing, broken through some act of rain, I can’t know. I was in motion reading against the pattern of the sidewalk when it registered not leaf rib, but faintest avian bone. More line than feather. A long enough time readable not before me but in some translating place. I only realized what I was reading after my weight had already transferred to the other foot in the middle of that rush of students in the rain after class on the first day of the winter quarter, in the near-still early day dark. I wish I didn’t have the impulse to tell the full truth, which is that I felt it, not higher up in the clenched reactive part of my body where I illustrate so much at a safe distance, but in the soft spot at the center of the T of my foot, through the sole of my sodden and swollen boot, right at the point of its sole gum where I have come over the years to feel things much more finely than the top of the boot might suggest: beneath the greybrown leather, inside the shoe rubbed clean of its once-shearling, that flat spot at the center of the T didn’t just read the ribcage of that drowned and disappearing one; it knew, in that one transfer of weight through its nearly gossamer sock, that it would be the one thing I would remember about the year. Rae Gouirand is the author of eight titles of poetry and nonfiction, including Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) and the book-length poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024). She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at UC-Davis. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “After the Parade of Storms”? Most of my work comes out as verse poetry, but much of the work I’ve produced that connects to the climate crisis has come out absent linebreaks. I think it’s possible that disorientations of some scale of magnitude can change a poet’s sense of how linebreaks double or double back on what’s suggested in a poem, and can change a poet’s relationship to implication. This piece was written in real time early one morning in January 2023 following the second or third in a monthlong series of severe storms that took down many magnificent trees that had been weakened by longstanding drought in my region of California. CNF: After the Parade of Storms
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD