Emily Pulfer-Terino
Inflorescence
Blossoming cotton,
rayon chiffon, polyester
sheer as fog—dresses
magazines branded granny.
Printed with English roses,
ditsy daisies, country calico,
skirts hung long and crumpled
over prim Victorian shoes
or boots steel-toed and brutal.
Adorned with straps and bows
like undone corsetry, sometimes,
or with peter pan collars,
or buttons of make-believe pearl.
I yearned for my own
granny dress from the flowering
farm where I lived as it failed,
wanting, watching the world.
Lilacs’ fragrant, brocade relief;
cherry tree split and electric
with blooms; pear blossoms;
crabapple; goldenrod;
pollen blinding in bright sun.
Glitter of flies as they hovered
and hummed, undulant
sequins, in teeming fields,
in a gorgeous display of decay.
Emily Pulfer-Terino's work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays The Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative non-fiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.
Why this Knocked Bleah Out:
I’ve been privileged to see Emily’s work out and about on social media, and to be mutuals with her on Instagram, so I was very excited to see her work in our BRAWL queue. When I read her packet, this poem immediately stood out to me as striking since I love a poem that’s full of place and the textures of that place. This poem felt alive and tangible to me, as well as deeply compelling… I kept coming back to it over and over again as I continued through reading submissions, and even going through my regular day. That’s how I know we’ve found something special, and I so admire Emily’s ability to capture a feeling in these sensory and sticky details—transferring the corporeal or intangible into something I can feel is a gift and we’re so lucky to be able to share that gift here at BRAWL!
Interview:
1.) When you're writing, how does inspiration usually find you for a piece? I like to call this the inciting incident.
My ideas typically constellate off the page, either in deliberately contemplative states or when I'm just sort of driving around and living. The act of writing itself is one of translation and winnowing, working towards clarity and as much concision as possible.
2.) Do you remember the particular spark, or moment of inspiration that fueled this poem?
Experiencing a period of intense nostalgia for 1990s fashion, magazine culture, and my own upbringing, I went on Ebay and purchased back issues of Vogue that I remembered loving as a girl. This launched a larger project than I had imagined, and I wrote a collection of poems recounting how my young imagination made fashion spreads into vibrant psychic tableaux and connected them with the expansive and rural landscape I lived in.
3.) One of the things I loved about this poem was how tactile it felt to me, what is your relationship to imagery when you write and how do you make things feel so tangible?
Thank you so much! I notice that I catalogue ideas and memories in very imagistic ways, so this accounts for some of it. I am also really interested in how physical and multisensory poetry is, so I often write aloud, reread a lot, and feel the work register in my torso and skull. I think that this bodily relationship to composition may lend itself to tactility.