Born in Burma and brought up in Baltimore, Catherine Wagner has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of Utah. Her books are Miss America (Fence 2001) and Macular Hole (Fence 2004). She has just finished co-editing, with Rebecca Wolff, Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poets on Child-Bearing and Child-Rearing (Fence 2007). Her chapbook, Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large, is recently out from Bonfire Press. She currently teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Everyone in the Room Is a Representative of the World at Large
I lived inside a box that was a poem.
and willow-twig
and I was the upshot of those decorations.
I managed! I managed them.
So, everybody, meet me in the poem.
Barbecue. Wineparty. Glee, rambunction,
wincing, breakage, fuck-de-do
magnetized around wit and around importance.
I complained again that no one talked
about poetry, and I too talked about
publishing. I too, published, I
said. Everyone was at my poem.
Whoa, the genre-stomping—
my party was liminal.
I queen-cusped it by wearing
a barrier-veil and submitting
to the men, which floored them.
I stood on a chair and asked about motherhood.
"the hood, yeh, I'm from there," she said;
she wore the gang colors, which are:
not being up to date, and undirectable
hatred: "He does all he can," "the kid is
lovable," and "the hood is no one's fault."
Can the walls of the box not be
motherhood and po-fright?
The escutcheoned opposite wall
leaned in.
Hey, straighten up! Flat out, on the recycling bin,
the MFA student shot herself.
Then the professor did, and the other professor
ate a lot of pills,
and the other students
passed the gun around, crack crick crick crick
all of them folded inward and were gone.
That flower got picked.
I so much want my box to be the coolest
and my party was breaking up
because the disjunct hadn't
cracked us up earlier. I desperately
narrated around the disjunct, cocooned it
as the motor of my car and drove away
my poem-box. Weialaleia,
people.