Free Mosquito by Alex Lemon Page B

sentence or three, and not necessitate the several books of poetry and prose that she had neatly stacked on the desk in front of her, their pages marked with colored Post-it notes.
    No, the crucial thing was that I couldn’t say “it,” because when named directly, abstractly, “it” vanishes. The subjective world can’t be rendered in a summation: “I nearly lost my life but now I am better,” Alex Lemon might say, but so what? That statement might move us in conversation, but on the page it’s empty. It is the made machinery of style that manages to replicate how it feels to be alive, and that’s why we
require it. “I stared into my eyelids’ / Bustling magic,” Lemon writes instead, “the black / Of my hands. Oh, how darkness / Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs / & the choke of the sea.” That is direct, in its way, but it’s also thoroughly couched in style, a mode of speaking.
    â€œThis is how it must be to make a language,” Sandra McPherson writes in “Suspension: Junior Wells on a Small Stage in a Converted Barn,” a beautiful poem occasioned by listening to the blues musician Junior Wells. She should know. Like Wells, she makes her signature sound out of the found and the improvised, cobbling together variation and synthesis, working out an idiom that will stand in for the texture of subjectivity, a model of the perceiving and speaking self. Like the blues, the making of a poetic style is a triumph over speechlessness, a refiguring of the dynamics of power, a song—however flinty and peculiar—where none had seemed possible.
    Style, unlike the defenseless body it is meant to clothe and to present, has a sort of permanence. John Berryman’s poems, for instance, which must be one of the ingredients of Lemon’s own wrought aesthetic, feel imbued with a sense of personality, the particular quirks of wit and bitterness. The regret and longing that fuel them are just as palpable now as they were the day the poems were written. Selfhood vanishes; style persists. As Berryman did, Lemon likes heated verbs, diction shifts (“thrummed” and “pissed”), tonal variations, a quick joke, outbursts of lyricism; he likes a poem to speed down the page. His artfully deployed stanzaic forms orchestrate our movement through his poems, arranging silences into patterns, making a music for ear and eye. He weaves a quick-shifting
fabric of figurative speech that seems to keep the poem fluid, unstable. Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container for struggle, love, and delight—even, for the wounded and dumb body (“anonymous as graffiti”), an undeceived, adult form of hope.
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    â€” Mark Doty

Trembling
    In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
    â€”Nietzsche
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    Hello friend, beautiful face
in car fire. I, the flesh wish,
am sickly wrapped in light.
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    I promise to wink the voyeur,
spike the drinks to a fine glow
& swallow. What happened
to your arms? Raw concrete,
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    bad paint? Uncapped, the bottle
can’t be broken. Voice, be amazing
circling the river bottom.
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    Remember fingers rattling locks,
fingers jump-starting the zipper
spine. Filleted boy. Anesthesia
is the bottle rocket. The belly.
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    Did you hear the rain last night,
thunder? Tomorrow, I will be
afraid. I might never wake up.

1

MRI
    An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least that’s what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.
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    He must be eating the same hot dogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhere—smiling
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    in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. I’m half-
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    naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I don’t laugh
because I think the veined cobweb
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    looks like Abe Lincoln’s profile