Americana – A trilogy by Shannon Finck

AMERICANA

Pulling strands of hair from my eyes,
I lose my dog down the beach
after gulls.

I watch her until she mottles
the rocks, small plants, 
hazy things.

My dad taught me to play the guitar
with America songs.
America songs are all I know.

Yet, here I am on the coast of California,
and America is just the horse 
with no name I rode in on.

I love this dog, who is 
always running away from me—
a sandy flightless freebird.

I’m writing a poem about you,
I yell to her—the speck of her,
the blur of her, her feet on the wing.

Later, at the foot of the bed,
in a dog dream,
she runs in place.

*

INVASIVE SPECIES

Despicable featherless bipeds, we roost 
under a threadbare sheet, 
tarred together by behind-knee sweat.
Spliffed, suntanned, we count 
each long day left of July, 
spending it, getting lucky
in a Pasadena pool house—
its owner, a slammer of screendoors, 
host to transcendental meditation parties
attended in pitch dark.
You say you saw David Lynch. 
I believe you. It’s pitch dark
as lakes in La Brea.
We squawk through the night— 
in the morning, the parrots talk to us.
The stalwart dachshund howls
at flowers by the mailboxes that, too, have mouths.
Something is said about the noise. 

I thought my bones were hollow
and yours were adamantium— 
a marvel, such mass—
but when we careen 
up HWY 1 in the superbloom,
you scream into sunlight,
and I find I have taken root
in the cane cholla with the 
trashed star map.

*

APPULSE

The robin has flung full
pectus and ventrum
into the window thrice.
It stands on the porch rail
not stunned, determined,
yellow legs like stalks of foxtail barley
swaying with the Diablos
as if made of wildfire. 

It will try again—
the avian arrhythmia
in its sunset breast,
wills the glass to give.
I want to think I know
what unknowable magnetism
causes it to see and not see
and move anyway.
But a bird’s heart
is its own ambit.

When your elbow
bumps the window
where you sit close,
I search the ground for red feathers,
for the body wrenched
like a stiff pocketknife.
It was only me, you say, standing—
only me, clumsy—
and I pitch into your arms, exhaling dryly
into the ridges and canyons,
the firebreaks of your ribcage.
The sky opens, and I fly.

***
Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, SWWIM, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.

The Library: The Heeding, by Rob Cowen and Nick Hayes

Read by Marcel Krueger:

One and a half years into the current global pandemic, and we now see the first publications of what you could call “Coronavirus Lit”. After a run on Camus' The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year when it all started, now contemporary writers have begun to engage with the pandemic itself, with quarantine, isolation and living through it - with a varying degree of success. One the one hand there are inspiring projects like the online and offline The Decameron Project of the New York Times Magazine, which brings together such diverse writers like Rivka Galchen, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood and Yiyun Li, on the other German novelist Thea Dorn's whiny Trost. Briefe an Max (Confort. Letter to Max) which barely misses becoming an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination manifest while pretending to be highbrow literature. 

The Heeding, a collaboration between writer Rob Cowen and illustrator and graphic artist Nick Hayes can definitely be considered Corona Lit, and is thankfully of the inspiring variety. The book contains 35 wonderfully illustrated poems and spans the pandemic from spring 2020 to spring 2021, but this is not a lockdown diary (even though it picks up contemporary themes like the Black Lives Matter movement), but a book about the world as a whole and our place in it. As Cowen says in the introduction, when referring to the trauma World War II his grandfather lived through:

"This book is born out of a different time and trauma, but perhaps it might likewise be thought of as a collection of things, of findings and workings out - if not conclusions - around our relationships with nature, ourselves and each other at another moment of profound change."

The theme of the poems varies immensely, from moors and allotments to living in quarantine with children, family grief, isolation and loneliness to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and drinking songs, nicely bookended by two poems about duels between hawks and their prey. Nick Hayes' illustrations complement the poems perfectly: the first image the reader encounters before said first poem is a hawk in flight that practically explodes from the page, and really gave me pause. 

The only weak point of this wonderful book is the – for me – sometimes too widely meandering subject matter of the poems. While this wide-angled approach is something that definitely works in Rob Cowen's prose work Common Ground, where walking a part of the edgelands makes the protagonist explore all sorts of interconnections and layers of history, the poems in The Heeding sometimes feel disjointed. But then, is disjointed not what we all felt at some point in the last twelve months? 

What I like about this beautiful book is that it treats the Covid-19 pandemic not as a once-in-a-lifetime event that we all have to make it through to get back to like everyone was before. It references extreme heatwaves and human failure to show humility in the face of nature, and that makes it more an example of the first contemporary plague literature than a look back at a unique event. As I write this the plague is still ongoing, and there are countries on the planet that have not even seen one single vaccine dose making its way there. And as things stand, this will not have been the last global pandemic in our lifetime - it's just a question if we can learn to better tackle these in the future. There will be more floods and droughts and heatwaves and fires and bumbling politicians failing, but maybe we can find hope and inspiration to face and change these in books like The Heeding. Or if not hope, then at least compassion for our fellow man and nature. It is sure needed. As Rob Cowen says in his poem ‘The End of This (Drinking Poem)’:

Pass me a glass. Give me courage
to start over. And be better.  

***

The Heeding is published by Elliott & Thompson.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.