FEAR
A different town lies
across that little bridge curved over
the river like a prayer.
The golden hour chimes
and the girls all run
from the chapel to the fields
their school skirts flicking like horse tails.
Here: a cat’s cradle
of scaffolding steel wool and end beams.
There: a street stall of watermelon
pink as fire.
The peaches have all rolled
from their enclosure
fresh pulp to sidewalk to dress shoes.
Everything, a metaphor.
Jamie, the pastor’s boy, watches
the tassels of the girls’ hair,
the wheat as it bends to them.
He follows them like a fieldmouse out
into the clearing where the moon rises
as a platter from the lake.
The trees are a chorus.
The girls undress
and become a flock of waterfowl.
Jamie hides among the mulberries, considering
their soft stomachs and burnt nipples,
and thinks of the kind of bird he’d be.
Quinn Newell
Quinn Newell (he/they) is a writer from Indiana currently finishing their Masters in English. Their poetry and fiction focuses on identity, childhood, obsession and other irrational late night-phobias. His work can be found in Laurel Review, MudRoom Mag, Apricot Press, swim press, and the horror fiction podcast Full Body Chills. Twitter: @qnewellpoetry
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
Everytime I got to a new line in the poem I was won over even more. There's this wonderful tension with the figure of Jamie in this poem. The watching of the girls which could be both voyeuristic, but also jealousy, but also self-ostracization, but also…etc etc etc. The moment you understand him fully doesn't come until the very end and then the whole context of the poem shifts. This forces a careful reread and a better understanding of the line “Everything, a metaphor.”
It’s also just full of great imagery. The peaches transferred to dress shoes. The girls skirts metamorphosed to horse tails. Jamie’s bird self, which we are not given, but can imagine all the same. The reader decides, waterfowl? Or what else?
This poem is wildly honest even as it tries to hide that honesty which I think is hard to do, but done masterfully here.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
It was seeing the bit in your Info section about sending poems with “the body” in it to you that really sealed the deal for me! I write a lot about the body in some way, and it never seems to be “my body” but some disconnected, defamiliarized “the body.” And while this poem specifically doesn’t include a basketball, I have a different poem that does -- so it felt like a sign from the universe to go Team Taylor!
The poem asserts that everything is a metaphor, talk to me about Jamie and the metaphorical weight that this figure carries within your poem.
I needed a conduit for the fear in the poem. There were already these contrasting descriptions in the town, and I had the feeling of it living in my chest somewhere when writing, but I needed a way for that to exist in the world of the poem. I think everything is a metaphor in poetry (at least in my poetry.) Those peaches aren’t just peaches; it means something that it’s dress shoes and not ballet flats or snow boots squashing them. What it means, I don’t know. That’s for Jamie to find out, I think.
This poem is balancing a lot, gender, faith, the natural world. How conscious of that are you as you're writing? How does revision play into helping achieve that balance?
Those subjects are always present somewhere in my writing, so I think they just bubble up without me really thinking about it. A lot of the meat of this poem - the descriptions especially - started as unrelated sentences. It was only once I put some next to each other that it created this strange picture of a little town.
And once I started really crafting the poem and revising it, it just made sense to connect the characters in the poem to the environment I had created. If there was a chapel, there had to be a pastor. If there’s a pastor, what about his son? And if the girls were all off becoming waterfowl, then what about Jamie? From there, it’s all just play – from language to imagery.