Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems
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About this ebook
The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry
Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor.
The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: “The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country.”
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Titles in the series (29)
First Nights: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlease make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScaffolding: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCarnations: Poems Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The Ruined Elegance: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Glossary of Chickens: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At Lake Scugog: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Almanac: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Syllabus of Errors: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Eternal City: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Flyover Country: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Two Yvonnes: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Erosion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The River Twice: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStet: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Rain in Plural: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hosts and Guests: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Unstill Ones: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Radioactive Starlings: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Explanation of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yellow Stars and Ice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Earthly Delights: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Before Recollection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New World: Infinitesimal Epics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Woman Under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI entered without words: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Book preview
Please make me pretty, I don't want to die - Tawanda Mulalu
SUMMER
ARGO, MY ARGO
The mirror’s crowfooted
not me. Afro’s gone Medusa again.
Every coil’s its own Hydra.
I’m adventuring with a comb.
The sink’s full of myths …
The myths are growing …
Every day I find myself
smaller with effort,
my life’s light
with every person who
spoke of me. Last night,
Achebe tried again
and I nearly heard him.
Ngũgĩ refuses these tones, says,
this music has the worst sort
of oceans beneath it.
Besides, his ears
are busy with real myths …
Being alive must be nice,
says the sink basin, filling
further with myths …
I say, abandon narrative,
latch onto landlocked
home—forget ships,
take planes! land with
passport onto place
with shore—forget ships,
take planes! land with
passport back to place
without shore—forget ships
for a day sometime on
winter break, during summer—
our only seasons here.
My body’s a crowfooted boat
not me. One time I went
blonde, that’s a different
prow. One time I went
with suit jacket, that’s a different
sail. One time I go
and touch the exact difference,
pretty, sailing, she says, I love you.
I say, whose boat.
STILL LIFE
Onanism but like coffee without the cream.
My skin yes but also the pointlessness
of our pleasures. In a maple seed’s shape
you have copper and plastic inside of you.
Nothing’s growing. I don’t finish.
So, I’m part of this thing where fish learned to walk.
Your first baby pictures look like seahorses.
We stop now to consider our lungs.
Look at all that we have made
and behold it is very good. Otherwise the pale beginnings
would swim to nowhere, gasping
with gills they do not have
(once, before memory, I made this journey
and found myself
somewhere, slapped
clean and crying with a new soft bottom).
Loneliness. That’s one way of seeing it.
A palm wet with dyings.
ARIA
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
—SYLVIA PLATH, ARIEL
An aria’s any song’s sympathy with Ophelia
An aria’s any darkness
Then any light involved in darkness
Then an aria’s like a pool of water
Then an aria’s like a painting
Then an aria’s like any other sound.
When you’re sleeping you sound
And the sound sounds up Karen
And the sound is how I would like to paint
Karen’s sounds on my darkness.
The sound is what I would like to be like the mirror
That Karen sinks into her darkness.
Mirrors are little darknesses
Not unlike my mouth how I try sounds
But find water.
I hope someday my mouth finds Karen Carpenter
Even if my mouth is not a mirror it is darkness
Even if the mirror is where her skin eats itself like paintings.
Your skin’s not a painting
It doesn’t eat itself it doesn’t eat my skin’s darkness
And in darkness your skin’s also darkness.
Your bedsheets make a sound
And the sound sounds up Karen’s
Sounds again. You wake and consider me. You pass me a bottle of water
And I drink it. Then take the bedsheets as water. Then take the air as water
And now I’m drinking all of you as a painting
—Which is when I hear horses, hear Sylvia:
She’s swallowing everything as paintings and her darkness
Is a red eye rising as morning’s first sound
Then the horse into that red eye is darkness
Then reading her horse into my black eyes is darkness
Then words are sometimes water
They’re the flow of sound
From each to the next, little sips then swallowing then with them we paint
Each other—the darkest darkness
—And I paint you, hear horses, hear you, Ophelia, Karen, Sylvia
Still painting over all of us and the darkness is painting
And the mirror is every little sipping sound in your room’s darkness
And the sounds are everywhere like skin like in this darkness how mine is yours
like any other white girl’s, an aria.