As if to speak the body is to stroke the sack of it.As if what remains will be comprehensible. We name it over and over, callit into what would be being if being weresimply insistence. I want to believe in something.I want to believe that effort is effect.Meanwhile, a girl’s head is crammed between her mother’s knees,the smell of her, the grease in her palms,the pull of the girl’s hair—tight tug into neat cornrows. Scalp archery. How manypeople does it take to make a person?I have had so many lovers, I forgot the one rape—me, a punishmentfusion. Float off down any stream, aimlessdriftwood, the hollow of—the box contains me too.The I feels nothing about it now, is gibberish to say, to healing.We could say, instead, we sand the hardened—like rip, like why even bother with refusal.
Then Death Came Like a Hammer Not a Metaphor
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“Then Death Came Like a Hammer Not a Metaphor” From INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS: by Dawn Lundy Martin.
Published by Nightboat Books on June 25, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Dawn Lundy Martin.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and activist whose published collections include Discipline; A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, winner of a Lambda Literary Award; and Good Stock Strange Blood, for which she received the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also coeditor, with Vivien Labaton, of The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism. She is the recipient of two poetry grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council as well as the 2008 American Academy of Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry. Martin is cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation, a New York–based grant-making organization that focuses on social justice activism; and founding member of the Black Took Collective, an experimental poetry and performance group. At Bard since 2018.
“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.
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