Flapper Press Poetry Café: Gillian Kessler, Part 1
Updated: Sep 2, 2022
By Annie Newcomer:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café welcomes back one of our talented regular contributors, Gillian Kessler, to share a selection of poems from upcoming new book, Ash in the Tree.
Gillian can be found dancing to loud music, teaching exuberant teens to appreciate language, writing in the early morning when everyone is asleep, and exploring the wilds of Montana with her beautiful family. She studied poetry at Santa Clara University with Edward Kleinschmidt, at UCLA with Suzanne Lummis, and more recently, in Missoula under the exceptional guidance of Chris Dombrowski, Mark Gibbons, and Phillip Schaffer. Her poems and essays have been published in Mamalode magazine, and she writes frequently for Flapper Press. Her poetry was featured in the anthology Poems Across the Big Sky Volume II. She has written two collections of poems, Lemons and Cement and the forthcoming, Ash in the Tree.
We reached out to Gillian to ask her about her work and inspirations and to tell us more about her poetry.
AN: What brought you to poetry? Why do you write?
GK: I've always written. When I was a young girl, I'd fill journals with big feelings, random observations, questions, concerns. I wrote poetry a bit as a teen, but it was really in college that I realized how deep my love was. I had some wonderful instruction at Santa Clara University as an undergrad, and my poetry friends brought a rich diversity into my college-girl life.
I write to feel, to see, to wonder, to hold. As a young mom, I blogged multiple times a day just to make sense of all the brilliance and frustration that was being a new parent. When my mom died, poems fell from me, almost as if she were speaking through me somehow. I would be hiking on the mountain behind myself and suddenly stop, open up the "Notes" app on my phone, and talk. Much of Ash in the Tree was written with that sort of random and divine intervention.
AN: What do you hope people will come away with from reading your poetry? GK: I hope that my work helps people see themselves just a bit. I know that I stepped on to the grief train with a heavy thud; I wondered where the words were to help me understand what I was feeling. I hope that Ash in the Tree helps people through the loss of a parent if, at least, to help them recognize that the magnitude of their feelings is absolutely okay. In the U.S., it seems that our understood rituals around grief (three bereavement-leave days, a funeral, a burial, and moving right along . . . ) is perfunctory, at best. I was wholly unrecognizable to myself for many, many months after my mom died. This book was a way for me to process the hugeness of it all.
These three poems are all a part of the forthcoming collection, Ash in the Tree, due in late July 2021 from FootHills Publishing. Ash in the Tree is a memoir-esque collection of musings and memories, heartbreaks and noticings following the death of my mother in November 2019. While in the throes of processing a world without her, the pandemic hit, and everything became even less settled, even more full of grief and unknowns.
"Eagles and Waxwings" is a memory poem. The title stems from my mom's strange distaste for birds but then moves into the moment she died—I was holding her hand, and four strange pulses went from her hand to mine. She didn't take another breath after that. This poem also plays with how much my mom loved watching my sister and I laugh, how many questions she asked us about whatever we felt was so dang funny.
Eagles and Waxwings
were never her thing,
until now
that she’s flown,
gone and left me
sober, relentless,
squeezed of sense,
squeezed and tossed like an
old song, I hear it
over and over again,
its silence evaporates
and then pours forth.
I feel her hands
on my shoulders –
a minor shudder –
the electric current
plays her chord
through my fingers –
I jolt up –
wait on her next
breath and the little girl
with white blue eyes
stares at the wall, tears
welling and says,
“She’s here! She’s here with us!”
and Sissy and I nod along,
sit closer, lean forward,
look for her on that
blank space and we’re
drunk on home, on memory,
on lazy Saturdays
where we’d laugh and laugh
our bony wings pink with delight,
flutter. Craning her neck,
she’d watch
us, smile, ask –
“What ever are you laughing at?”
her feathers perfectly arranged.
"Deaf Girl" was written at the start of 2021. I had been back at teaching in person, fully masked, since September, and my professional life was continuing to move forward in the blurry haze presented to a hearing-impaired person in a masked world. This poem feels like a bit of a proclamation to owning my disability. The repetition of the lines "I'm a deaf girl" becomes a bit of a mantra, perhaps a way to own and hold all the challenges and face them with a bit more gumption and gusto. I've never had to talk much about my disability before; it was something that I masked really well through lip reading, hearing aids, and the innocent "can you repeat that?" and "pardons." The pandemic shut down my quiet dealings and made me have to face my impairment in a whole new way.
Deaf Girl
We somehow knew the silence
would bury us all - the stillness and
warnings of ash and sharp tongues
screaming across the valley.
I’m a deaf girl in a volcanic world,
my drums ruptured and stilled,
no longer willing to thrive, even in this
fertile opening of a new year.
I’m a deaf girl in a voluminous world,
warning signs blare over Echo Park,
they spatter and shout and still, all I heard
was the quiet of shadows, the way you began
to resemble a moon. I’m a deaf girl in a sick world
and behind the masks, there’s nothing but
muffle - muffle - ruffle - splat - sound smudged
like a ceremony I’m no longer a part of.
I see in ruptured haze, fits and spurts and
even if it’s a skill I’m learning, eyes don’t
read like a mouth, the shape of lips, the placement
of tongue, upturned or tight, open or afraid.
I’m a deaf girl in a quaking world and all
around me is the movement of mountains,
the questions of children, I know they need me
but fake another answer, sometimes it’s simpler than:
What?
Come again.
One more time.
Sorry, I didn’t catch that.
I just can’t hear you.
Just can’t hear you.
Just can’t hear you.
I wish I knew.
II.
I do know some things:
The dog would like me to take him
into the gold hills of early January,
know thirteen is a shock to the system,
and ten still has a certain ease.
I know my husband is devoted,
sisters too.
I know there’s a drip in the bathroom sink
and implant surgery scares the hell out of me.
I know that I need to walk most days,
know that I need to watch clouds and
let my head fall back, throat open
to the sky.
I know our mom is dead,
our mom is dead,
our mom is dead,
and we held her and told stories,
played Monty Python’s “Always look
on the bright side” because she loved irony
and rubbed overly scented lotion into
her purple balloon hands.
I know my ears don’t get much
but the rest of me works doubletime
to piece it all together,
like a shadow puppet play,
all the clear edges are there,
the specifics are up to you
"On A Weekend Jaunt to the Old Folks Home" was written the May before my mom died. I was on the plane returning to Montana after a long weekend away with her. While the weekend was full of beautiful moments, it was also full of the strange sensations of seeing your parent as a very old, very slow, very different human. While so much of my book honors all the best parts of my mama and our relationship, this poem captures some of the moments that were more challenging, more frustrating, more full of nuanced newness.
On a weekend jaunt to the old folks home I. She collects walkers like she used to gather hand bags or good shoes, they line up by the door like a motley crew of mechanical knights: one shiny blue all ablaze with a tartan sack, another red and metallic and lean, a new one that helps her stand straighter with armrests - it looks a bit like a robot, or a man she hasn’t decided she likes yet, but each one is already bedazzled with a bit of her flair, a ribbon or swath of fabric or jaunty pouch for keepsakes - she still has that panache, that desire for everything to be just so. At 85 she’s a night owl, a pot stirrer, doesn't go out much, hums incessantly to keep herself company. “Humming is an early sign of dementia!”
she tells me, then tells me again. She moves with a speed I can hardly fathom. It’s like walking through molasses covered in sand in the hot sun, on psychedelics. Something like that. If that could even be a thing. It’s like melting. We are in Walgreens looking at adult pads. she wants me to reach each bag so she can read it more closely - She can’t find the right ones. I reach and she reads, reach and read, points to the package I just put down, wants that one again but doesn’t want them individually wrapped, though special wrappers are not indicated on the outside, so I feel and attempt to solve this ridiculous puzzle, fly above myself and watch the scene slow down like a warped record or a video on slo-mo without a pause button, a movie I can’t direct as I’m trapped in the theatre because we haven’t even started looking for the probiotics yet, and god knows those labels have a lot of information to weed through - whichever will we choose? She’s so thrilled to be “in the outside world” that no other rules exist like how long any human should spend examining packaging, the walker wheels rolling slowly up and down the aisles, the same aisles, until
she’s ready to go.
II. She sleeps in and I check on her, the tiniest sliver of light shines on the pillow. She is so still, so peaceful. After I had to beg her to put off the lights and turn off the TV last night: “This is the time of day when I come alive!” she declares and she asks me to bring her another small glass of milk, and some slivers of dark chocolate, and I can barely hold my head up, teeter dazed into the kitchen, the weight of what’s to come, Immense.
Annie Newcomer teaches poetry classes at the University of Kansas Medical Center's Turning Point—a place for hope and healing for people suffering with chronic health problems. Her North Stars series shares interviews with poets and writers and Annie's own experiences through writing.
Annie is also helms the Flapper Press Poetry Café—dedicated to celebrating poets from around the world and to encouraging everyone to write poetry!
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