from Ideal Machine
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Heather Christle features an excerpt from Ashley Toliver’s chapbook Ideal Machine, orginally published by Poor Claudia. About Toliver’s work, Christle writes: “When I read these poems by Ashley Toliver I feel a constellation has suddenly come clear in the sky. At one corner Keats’ bright star shines stedfast over the poet’s sweet unrest. At another Zbignew Herbert commands us to ‘be vigilant’ ‘as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star.’ And at the third corner—the one that makes this constellation a shape, not merely a line, Toliver gives us her ‘hustle star / star in me.”‘Whether Toliver’s star gazes toward the tenderness and uncertainty of pregnancy, or to surgery’s strange erotic potential, it provides a fierce and dark center to her powerful, graceful lines, where, like Herbert warns us, ‘No one will console you.’ I don’t want to take away your experience of encountering Toliver’s closing in situ, so you should read the poems before going any further with this introduction. And now that you have, I will close with pointing out the way the ultimate lines of this particular constellation of poems make their own eerie tercet—Herbert, Keats, Toliver—shining in darkly rhymed light. ‘Be faithful Go / And so live ever—or else swoon to death / death is the last road to awe I know.'”
from Ideal Machine
dear surgeon let’s say
we try it: put my tongue to curette
let you carve in
at night
the room fills with children each one
of them ours they flame
around in their gene pools
live instruments tuned shivering
the glass
a little resonance
picture postcard hair behind the ear
just the same place is a curl
you can touch it
the intersection a line
drawing back to intervene
tissue and bone a moan one makes
the hand that lifts
to clavicle one note pulled to crater
they can sing or forget
to sing
•
dear daughter you lived:
born before the clean sweep
twinning above you
halo moot lightning
handful of grey carnations you appeared
analogous in frame
a stitch of beyond-me
dull pearls you began to speak by blossoming
dear daughter
in an instant I become cinematic
my trigger finger
gives silk to the knot and he grows
hustle star
star in me
•
dear son don’t flinch
when he comes for you
singing through my brain my face
lure you wait
shadows flat under the operating lights
scissor to flower to bone
•
a coiled thing slipped pattern in aperture
filial wrists turning he pulls
out of the skull an animal first humming
then flaming
heavy hive with
the wrong birds inside
people fall in
and out of love all the time
at night I put him between my teeth
tender roe bones
brittle as mica
see how the mother-parts shine
the amber lake I am building around them
tiny whirl blister of
architecture cold music
•
dear tiny icicle you barely existed though
enough
you were not meant to be mine
you were not meant to be made
I lean out over the bridge let you fall and burst
I place the nickel in your mewling mouth
don’t remove it
on days when I’m feeling especially cold I ride
through my own
icebox of logic
once I chose life over death
how mundane
death is the last road to awe I know
Once a week, the PEN Poetry Series publishes work by emerging and established writers from coast to coast. Subscribe to the PEN Poetry Series mailing list and have poems delivered to your e-mail as soon as they are published (no spam, no news, just poems).
These poems first appeared in Ideal Machine, published by Poor Claudia in 2014.