Lafayette Wattles
Until I was asked this question, I hadn’t actually sat down and consciously thought about how gender informs my work. Yet, in doing so, I do see a few patterns I hadn’t even been aware of myself. Often gender is portrayed in absolutes, in blacks and whites, and I have always felt that was such a disservice to everyone. In my work, I do find that strength is often portrayed by the female characters and tenderness by the males, though there is no one definitive portrayal that I tend to echo. I try to take what most people might expect a person in a particular situation to be like and change them in some way to suggest that character isn’t defined by (or limited by) one’s chromosomes. Most of my poetry could begin with the line, I wonder what it’s like to be, as I tend to write narrative “poetry of witness,” poetry that thrusts, perhaps, a brief moment from my own life into a life I have observed or, more often, into a life I have imagined. I try to use that moment, not as recollection, per se, but as my way in, as a lens thru which I can examine the other life (as I envision what part that oft insignificant event might actually play in the other life). And in my attempt to empathize, to wear that other skin, I depict gender based on my interpretation of, hopefully, a non-stereotypical person.
a small joy thrown into a long defeat
- from "we grieved" by mike rollin
1
before the final leaving, you lost in that chair by the window,
before the looks came from so far away,
before we were strangers, before the emptiness that comes from once being too full of a thing,
before the weight of what we carried between us
thinned until it grew too much to bear,
2
before your tender breasts, before the tiny curl
of newborn hands, your knees up, like that night
with the rain still on us, stars coming in through open windows,
before the prickly months of swollen belly,
before wet clothes heaped upon the hardwood,
just inside the big front door, your parents gone,
3
before the picnic, the unpredicted rain, which has remained
beneath the skin all these years,
before ink on the palm, your name so light to carry,
before your finger brushed mine, as we reached for the apple
at the corner store, the warmth of that touch, like the very first spark.
Soup Kitchen
Do you remember when you and Scratch got busted
by mom when she found that stash of headless garden gnomes
in the wheel barrow out in the shed, the day she decided
it was time for Spring, which got her looking in all the corners
for more things you’d done, and she found that High Street
street sign, the green ceramic pipe (screen still full of residue),
the raunchy magazines with all those spread-legged women,
the slinky underwear you’d swiped from Mrs. C’s clothesline,
that shriveled latex sleeve that had seen better days,
or one at least, with Kim, months before she was expecting,
how mom showed up at school, pulled you from class by your ear,
with all those heads popping out classroom doors
as you were dragged down the hall, how she and Principal Moody
got to the bottom of your mischievous career,
how they discovered three dime bags in your locker,
and the name tag of that barking dog you and Scratch had snatched
from your English teacher’s backyard, the dog you two had shipped
to your pen pal in Greece, the boy with all those curls,
with all those I’s and U’s and S’s in his name, who sent you
that photograph of blue sky and sea and white-washed buildings
in the background, the one of him and Apollo, which he’d named
after the Sun God because of its golden fur, how they found that cash
and just assumed you’d been dealing, not knowing you’d sold your stereo
to the quarterback to buy Kim a ring from some guy Scratch knew
from the streets, and the police came, and you had to wear that corduroy suit
to court, and the judge was this old man with a stiff red face,
and he gave you a choice and you went with forty hours
of community service at the soup kitchen, and for the longest time
mom couldn’t look at you without crying, and you blamed her
for your anger, blamed her for his leaving, for your own leaving
long before you ever moved out, said she was the reason
you treat women the way you do, inconvenient conveniences,
as if you’d forgotten how she gave up hearing from her left ear
to save you from his fist, and she watched me, then,
like maybe I’d go through my own raging morphosis—off to bed
one night wrapped in happy football sheets, only to rise in the a.m.
warped and broody—so I had to learn to hide that side of me
when the time came, you off somewhere in the neon west,
that desert town I know now you will never leave alive,
from which you’ve been in touch a handful of times
with your early morning slurs, those nearly indecipherable phone calls
when you share your hate, tell her how she failed you,
beg her to wire you a way out of some dark fix, just one last time,
and all those in between months of silence, of her trying
to track you down, imagining you in some alley, no ID,
just the calluses on your shoeless feet, dirt crammed
under your nails, broken teeth, needle still biting a vein,
and how the ones who find you will think you’d been unloved,
will never know you ran from it like some ravenous disease
she’d tried to spoil you with, and it’s wrong, it’s so unbrotherly,
but sometimes I do pray she’ll get that late-night call
with news the son who left those years ago has finally gone,
because then I might, at least, get one of you back, but you always
seem to reappear, and I lose you both all over again.
A Ucross Foundation Fellow and graduate of Spalding University’s MFA program, Lafayette is currently working on the young adult novel-in-verse, A Boy Called Mo. His poetry has most recently appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Juked, FRIGG, 13th Warrior Review, poeticdiversity, and Blood Orange Review, among others. One of Lafayette’s poems was chosen for the 2008 Best of the Net Anthology and another was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize and for Best New Poets 2009.