On Craft
Erica Dawson
In a basement classroom, I sit at a desk,
listening to a grad student talk about
imagery. I’m newly eighteen and think
myself a poet. She says I can scan.
She hands out copies of “In the Waiting Room”
by Bishop, starts reading, gets to the part
with the Black women’s breasts, hanging and awful
and horrifying. Only natural,
I picture mine, the way they droop though I’m
barely full grown, nipples at the bottom,
nothing perky. Heredity’s extra
hard when you have inherited what some
call ugliness—my mother’s chest the same
as mine, her mother’s too, I guess. She owes
me tens of thousands of dollars, Ms. Bishop,
for push up bras, for the white woman porn,
for the reduction and lift I get at thirty.
Those scars—like I’ve been carved—not horrifying
but still reminders of the intimation
of hatred for my body, now my breasts
starting to sag again, me wondering
if any man will put them in his mouth.
I wonder what Bishop hopes for. Don’t we all,
the ones who generate the metaphors,
call it the way we see it, wish that one
image sticks in a person’s mind so rich
they feel something about themselves or others.
The first job of the poet is to say
what we are, the second what we are becoming.
I turn the pages over on the desk.
The radiator hisses hard. Sunset.
The winter in my chest, deep down, feels good.
listening to a grad student talk about
imagery. I’m newly eighteen and think
myself a poet. She says I can scan.
She hands out copies of “In the Waiting Room”
by Bishop, starts reading, gets to the part
with the Black women’s breasts, hanging and awful
and horrifying. Only natural,
I picture mine, the way they droop though I’m
barely full grown, nipples at the bottom,
nothing perky. Heredity’s extra
hard when you have inherited what some
call ugliness—my mother’s chest the same
as mine, her mother’s too, I guess. She owes
me tens of thousands of dollars, Ms. Bishop,
for push up bras, for the white woman porn,
for the reduction and lift I get at thirty.
Those scars—like I’ve been carved—not horrifying
but still reminders of the intimation
of hatred for my body, now my breasts
starting to sag again, me wondering
if any man will put them in his mouth.
I wonder what Bishop hopes for. Don’t we all,
the ones who generate the metaphors,
call it the way we see it, wish that one
image sticks in a person’s mind so rich
they feel something about themselves or others.
The first job of the poet is to say
what we are, the second what we are becoming.
I turn the pages over on the desk.
The radiator hisses hard. Sunset.
The winter in my chest, deep down, feels good.
Erica Dawson is a Black neurodivergent poet living in the Baltimore-DC area. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Orion, Revel, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals and anthologies. She loves her dog Stella, Wu-Tang, and anything cooked with cardamom.
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