<div class="line">Some days my mind is like</div>
<div class="line">a gull hanging onto</div>
<div class="line">a sandwich too big</div>
<div class="line">to swallow, beak clamped</div>
<div class="line">on the monstrous bite</div>
<div class="line">as it runs from other gulls</div>
<div class="line">so as not to share.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/MaliMind.mp3"></audio></figure>

It Kept Always Being Sunday

Burger King

Mind Too Much

<div class="line">Up on the bridge roof—a pinprick</div>
<div class="line2">on a floating speck</div>
<div class="line">of wood and sail—</div>
<div class="line4">the scale is comforting,</div>
<div class="line2">not frightening.</div>
<div class="line6">A fine way</div>
<div class="line4">to disappear.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">The man says, <i>Hey gorgeous</i>,</div>
<div class="line2">and I get wet.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">On a dive, I shoot a pair of green</div>
<div class="line2">ornate ghost pipefishes</div>
<div class="line">until I run out of air, my last</div>
<div class="line4">inhale a shock</div>
<div class="line2">like sucking on a corked hose.</div>
<div class="line6">I have to breathe</div>
<div class="line4">off his tank to survive.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">In a grind of sharks I shoot,</div>
<div class="line2">one scarred pregnant female.</div>
<div class="line">Shark sex is rough.</div>
<div class="line4">It leads to multiple wounds,</div>
<div class="line2">few offspring.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">We ride in a skiff across the equator,</div>
<div class="line2">magenta-gold light</div>
<div class="line">on the green-wrapped</div>
<div class="line4">islands we zip around.</div>
<div class="line2">I stand to shoot the scene</div>
<div class="line6">and almost fall</div>
<div class="line4">because of the chop.</div>
<div class="line">The man holds my hips</div>
<div class="line2">to steady me. So he’ll keep</div>
<div class="line">his hands there, I shoot</div>
<div class="line4">way past the point</div>
<div class="line">of available light.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Before the next dive, he puts a Band-Aid</div>
<div class="line2">on a sore on my wrist.</div>
<div class="line">It becomes a game, my sticking out</div>
<div class="line4">my arm, palm up,</div>
<div class="line2">before each dive.</div>
<div class="line6">I know where</div>
<div class="line4">they’re kept, could do it</div>
<div class="line">myself, but I like</div>
<div class="line2">his care, his light</div>
<div class="line6">touch on my wrist.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">I shoot a pair of broad-club cuttlefish.</div>
<div class="line2">The male puts his body</div>
<div class="line">between me and the female</div>
<div class="line4">who continues to lay</div>
<div class="line2">eggs in a coral hollow</div>
<div class="line6">despite the strobes’ flash.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Four more days on the boat, lying awake</div>
<div class="line2">in a cabin three doors down</div>
<div class="line">from his body.</div>
<div class="line4">At my station</div>
<div class="line2">on the starboard side,</div>
<div class="line6">I fiddle with my mask</div>
<div class="line4">and watch him gear up</div>
<div class="line">at his port-side station:</div>
<div class="line2">Wetsuit, boots, BCD, tank,</div>
<div class="line">do-rag, gloves, mask.</div>
<div class="line4">Extra-long fins under his arm</div>
<div class="line2">as he walks to the skiff.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">One night we sit and chat on the bridge roof</div>
<div class="line2">alone.</div>
<div class="line">When he gets up to refill my glass,</div>
<div class="line4">our feet brush,</div>
<div class="line2">sending a jolt of heat through me.</div>
<div class="line6">The rest of the chat</div>
<div class="line4">I hope our feet</div>
<div class="line">will meet again.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">The iron taste of his sun-cracked lips,</div>
<div class="line2">his adept tongue</div>
<div class="line">and mind, arms</div>
<div class="line4">that lift and turn me</div>
<div class="line2">this way</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line6">and that, how</div>
<div class="line4">he washes my hair</div>
<div class="line">and towels me dry.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/MaliDiving.mp3"></audio></figure>

Decision

Japanese Aquarium Urges Public to Video-Chat Eels Who Are Forgetting Humans Exist

Diving

<p><em>Review by Sheila Black</em><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/maligaze.jpg" alt="Steady, My Gaze by Marie-Elizabeth Mali" align="right" /></p>
<p><small>Tebot Bach<br />
P.O. Box 7887<br />
Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887<br />
ISBN 9781893670662<br />
2011, 80 pp., $15.00<br />
<a href="http://tebotbach.org/publication.html">http://tebotbach.org</a></small></p>
<p>I have a friend, a poet, a brilliant formalist who writes learned and gorgeous villanelles, terza rimas, sestinas. Once, not long ago, she was bemoaning the current poetry scene. Wringing her blunt but elegant hands, she snarled. “It’s not so hard to be snarky and paratactic.” And then she sighed and added, “But, then again, it’s hard to find an intelligent humanist these days&#8211;too much faux humanism, human-lite.” And when I considered the current poetry scene I knew<em> exactly</em> what she meant: Snarky and paratactic versus human-lite. Like Bear versus Shark—or rather Shark versus Bear!—these two poetic modes seemed to revolve around me like Scylla and Charybdis as the common threats, the possible shoals on which any poet of today might all too easily be shipwrecked. Brilliant surface and heartless irony versus plodding and sincere.</p>
<p>Well, most of us (to be dead honest) would probably choose the snarky and paratactic route&#8211;the cool girl pose, knowing all the while that what used to be called “serious poetic purpose” might demand something a little quieter, a little steadier, a lot more vulnerable. Which brings me to <em>Steady, My Gaze</em> by Marie-Elizabeth Mali. Mali’s work in this debut collection seems both aware of and able to sail blithely between our present-day poetic rocks and whirlpools&#8211;to be just snarky enough to be cool, but also resoundingly sincere and, therefore, large. Her style is a rousing combination of the heartfelt and the chill, the lush and the austere, as evidenced in lines like:</p>
<p>I’m from the subway’s roar-squeal through a sidewalk grate</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m from sheets rustles and shoes shaken to wake snakes<br />
I’m from Sasson jeans and <em>how’d a girl like you learn to dance like that</em><br />
I’m from human cactii and emotional thermoclines<br />
I’m from marginalia and <em>what language is she speaking</em></p>
<p>(“Origins”)</p></blockquote>
<p>Few poets writing seem as attuned to and driven by the gorgeous sensuality of the world, which Mali captures with both facticity and flair and a careening motion:</p>
<blockquote><p>Hands leave behind more than prints—<br />
The knitting and the ripping, empty<br />
Grape stems in a red bowl, a bruise</p>
<p>(“Taken for Granted”)</p></blockquote>
<p>Yet Mali is also acutely aware of the converse&#8211;the world of emptiness, loss, imminent decay. While Mali’s subjects&#8211;love, and most particularly married love, the domestic life&#8211;would seem to suggest a poet of the humanist bent&#8211;Sharon Olds, Jane Hirschfield, those great poets of the body&#8211;Ms. Mali, for all her gorgeous lyricism, has a startlingly austere streak. What builds the power of her work and makes it most genuine and enlarging, in fact, is its sneaky combination of gorgeous sensual life and a sense of the stern empty and eternal above, around, beneath. This is shown both by her choice of subject and the formal choices she makes.</p>
<p><em>Steady, My Gaze</em> presents an alternating consideration of married life and various forms of spiritual practice from yoga to Zen meditation. Over the course of the book, the lessons or insights gained from each come to seem inextricably bound. The good marriage which is one of her primary subjects, for instance, contains within a history of a suicide of her partner&#8217;s first wife, as well as the usual trials, tribulations, and frustrations. Yet Mali also traces the small acts of almost heroic kindness, the moments of unexpected grace and forgiveness, that keep the marriage alive and vital. To her credit, Mali makes the story of her couple believable, funny, human, and also searing. In one poem, for example, titled “Newly Wed,” Mali writes: “He is not the man/who talks over me in public. Okay, sometimes/he talks over me in public.” In a later poem, “Fifth Year of Marriage,” she declares she married because she “wanted to grow, having gone/as far as I could along the wake-up path alone,” continuing that it is easy to feel enlightened “when no one’s leaving/clothes on the floor or dishes on the sink.” It is Mali’s strong sense of the physical world, the facticity of it, the daily-ness of it that gives power to her spiritual journey in the book; it is her sense of the austerity and vastness of the world of spirit, in turn, that gives fire and feeling to her depictions of the everyday world.</p>
<p>In Mali&#8217;s poems, these poles are further charged by her sense of what it is to be a woman in the world, and also complicated by her own multi-cultural&#8211;French, Swedish, German, Venezuelan&#8211;heritage that leaves her looking for words, a language she can live with or in. In the poem “Knife,” Mali writes of this:</p>
<blockquote><p>                                      When I think<br />
Of the myriad ways there are to hurt a woman, I chop<br />
The avocado so small it liquefies. No matter what<br />
You have to pick up the knife and begin again.</p></blockquote>
<p>Mali writes in another particularly effective poem, “The Questions Themselves,” of the notion of what the spirit is or wants and, through the accretion of large questions and specific detail, traces a vivid picture of the paradox of our love of specificity as set against our need for an instant of complete spiritual apprehension:</p>
<blockquote><p>Theories are like wine glasses. Exposed<br />
to pure pitch, right volume, they shatter.</p>
<p>What if, as we grip our glasses, drunk,<br />
God’s the one lighting the votives—</p>
<p>our questions, our ecstasies—trembling<br />
a little with laughter, knowing we won’t think<br />
to look behind our eyes at the observer;</p>
<p>even as we witness the way morning<br />
makes holy the surfaces it touches.</p></blockquote>
<p>Her poems can be worldly, the language of the smart girlfriend who is generous, gossipy&#8211;and yes a little sequined and even snarky&#8211;but they contain within the still center in the flame; they surprise you every time with their improbable and hard-won largeness of heart. Most definitely not “human-lite.” In his book of essays <em>Twentieth Century Pleasures</em>, Robert Hass writes in the essay “Images” of the Japanese haiku masters and praises them&#8211;Issa and Basho in particular&#8211;for capturing the world “as it is,” “the fullness and emptiness of things.” That is perhaps the closest I can come to an accurate description of what draws me and holds me hardest in Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s work, the fullness and emptiness. And I am eager to know where she will go from here.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
</blockquote>


Confessional

Safe Haven

STEADY MY GAZE

<div class="line">We pray for the troops at war with old gear</div>
<div class="line">in that intricate date-scented desert where</div>
<div class="line">a mother spits. House and son gone this year.</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="line"><em>Kill him</em>, a man at the rally sneers,</div>
<div class="line">as the first notes of “Strange Fruit” plummet the air.</div>
<div class="line">We pray for the troops at war with old gear.</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="line">Jesus is hailed. Community organizers draw jeers.</div>
<div class="line"><em>Drill!</em> screeches the woman with upswept hair.</div>
<div class="line">A mother spits. House and son gone this year.</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="line">A Kansas woman says it’s Muslims she fears.</div>
<div class="line">But they die in uniform for the ground we share.</div>
<div class="line">We pray for the troops at war with old gear.</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="line">Wall Street and Main Street recklessly steer.</div>
<div class="line">The story of a mother named Jocelyn Voltaire—</div>
<div class="line">She spits. House foreclosed and son gone this year—</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="line">moves strangers to send $30K and volunteers.</div>
<div class="line">The house stays hers for now, the court declares.</div>
<div class="line">We pray for the troops at war with old gear.</div>
<div class="line">A mother spits. House and son gone this year.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/MaliCampaign.mp3"></audio></figure><p></p>

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May 9, 2023Mind Too MuchMarie-Elizabeth Mali

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May 9, 2023Mind Too MuchMarie-Elizabeth Mali

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