Random Afternoon Poetry Reading Series, Part Three: The Midwest

While the stories told in this poem are not biographically accurate, their emotional accuracy is spot on. How can that be? Sometimes stories serve as more accurate representations of our interior worlds than reality. In the case of The Midwest, being bitten by a pit viper in the Amazon and watching and feeling a beautiful Bolivian suck the venom out from my wrist represents the exotic feeling of falling in love without requiring that that person love me back--in some way that act in and of itself drew a kind of poison out of me, the poison of the ego. In that snake reference, the Bible sort of has to be present in a way, so the snake is a small nod to the ego. There is also the contrast of the title, the notoriously "boring" midwest of the US beside the effortlessly exotic scene in South America as a way of pointing out that exoticism can be anywhere, even in your hometown next to Lake Michigan.

In case you want to hear me read the poem, I have a short video here with just a little talk about process at the beginning. If not, the poem is below the video.

---

THE MIDWEST

We would play MacGyver near the water
McKinley Marina, nightfall, a cord wrapped around my legs
where you let the skin rub away,
a little blood to convince us of danger,
of our wilderness
before you’d kiss me, tied up, kiss me, released.

This scar near my left ankle a kind of dark passage.

Beside us Lake Michigan stretches in quiet nakedness beyond the passing boats.

So,
I have another scar on my right wrist from a small pit viper.
A kayak in the leafy rainforest.
A beautiful Bolivian sucking at the base of my hand,
her full brown lips pressed against me so seriously.
Bright green birds, their loud voices ricocheting between ceiba trees.

It reminded me of vertigo, drifting, drifting until a new

unfamiliar world would appear.

A third scar centered on my left foot is an escape wound.
Low stuttering, thunder’s ascent from a frozen lake.
Jagged fragment of ice then crystals of blood
glittering up to the great northern night sky

where aurora borealis feels close to dying

to living

the water’s far dark edge right up to the sky’s.

The truth is
not all of this is true.
And there are other lies too.
I’m sorry.

The truth is tougher to track down.

You drew a thick outline of Wisconsin behind my left shoulder
with the words where go the boats written inside.
Lake Michigan invisible to the east.
It’s all invisible now
but I can still run over it with my hands.

---

This poem is from my first poetry book You Had Me At Topography, which you can find here if you're interested:

http://jessicalakritz.com/shop/

xoxo and thanks for listening <3