Jason Myers
Poetry
Jason Myers is the Editor-in-Chief of The EcoTheo Review. His writing has appeared in American Poet (introduced by Campbell McGrath), The Believer, Ecotone, Image, The Paris Review, West Branch, and numerous other publications. He lives outside Austin, where he works in hospice and is seeking ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.
Ars Poetica in Which the Poet is Not a Cockroach
much more pleasant than what Kafka imagined.
It is, fortunately, he wrote, a truly immense journey.
Swee swee sool was the sound I tried to make from
the pit to the flesh to the sunset-sadsweet skin.
But I have no voice because I am a peach. If
you’re reading this, kudos. I can let you into
the secret rooms of my delectation. For I have never
desired a thing as much as to be devoured, to be a
river in your mouth. When you crave something, crave
me. If you can’t recall the taste of a peach, it’s because
you’re eternally cursed. I’d say maybe next time, but
we both know that’s wishful thinking. We keep
forgetting. For I have never forgotten anything
so much as the look of light dawdling over the limbs
of the tree where my siblings grew. When you eat
my brothers & sisters, you will glimpse a bit of my
philosophy. Ask yourself, are these thoughts mine
or the result of some long-ago conflagration? Ask,
what is my favorite systematically oppressed people
& when was the last time I appropriated their culture?
Ask, fuck this country. Sorry, that wasn’t
a question, I’m a peach. Please drink responsibly
from this fountain of melancholia. If you get too
sad, there’s no such thing. It’s funny—we’ll eat
any damn thing with relish, but cannibalism’s
taboo. When you kneel at the altar to drink,
what do you think is happening? There are advantages
to being edible, to being a sphere of liquid July. Still,
there’s a wistfulness, a brokenness. I recognize that
whatever form I find myself in, I cannot be
another form. Inheritance only comes after loss.
To be blessed is to be bereft.
“ I think a lot about appropriation and the line ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal.’ What is the lasting effect of such plunder? How can we reimagine ourselves as artists who owe something to the past and to other makers of the present? And what is the relationship between inheritance and loss? What belongs to an individual maker, an individual poem? I’m also constantly thinking about the Eucharist, and how the idea of eating/imbibing/devouring God is both bizarre and deeply nourishing—in some ways the antithesis of the alienation expressed in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis.’ Food culture, too, is a locus of great appropriation, erasure, etc., so it was interesting to imagine how a particular food might feel about being consumed; the way that such consumption can be an expression of great tenderness and affection and, at the same time, literal annihilation. ”