Three New Poems: “Straining for the Noise,” “Srdičko Bolí,” and “Has Your Spirit Dried Up?”

The LARB Quarterly, no. 43: “Fixation” presents new poems from Jenny Xie, Claressinka Anderson, and emet ezell.

By Jenny Xie, Claressinka Anderson, emet ezellDecember 14, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

These poems are a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

JENNY XIE

Straining for the Noise

Exhaustion is simple: subtract and keep subtracting.
 

White from eye-whites, interiors from openings, sight
out of yet another recursive dream reel.
 

West Houston slowing to fine syrup, mashed with Europeans,
loose English and leather billfolds.
 

How walking through a crowd yields no blaze, only a sense of one
pronouncement moving in a path toward another.
 

What is there left that isn’t repetition and revision,
now that meaning has no skin, and the unfamiliar arrives more
or less at the same temperature?
 

That’s how it goes. And what are you? You’re a part
of speech, little sturdy assemblage of letters insisting on the syntax.
 

See how your head turns when you long
for the dark to grow a suede head, when you peel film
off the names things assume during day hours?
 

They don’t take, lately—the faces of these things, tamed and neat.
 

And neither do you. Though here you are, still out of focus,
while the transparency of plain things begins to retreat.

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CLARESSINKA ANDERSON

Srdičko Bolí

I hear a voice, small
& interrupting—

the irritation in me rises
as I talk over it,

but the words
are incessant, a current—

pulsing. I am talking
to his father, trying

to be heard. He tells him:
your mother is talking,

I am listening to your mother.
I take a sip of water, & still,

I do not hear him, but then slowly
I do, his sounds come into view:

Srdičko bolí,
srdičko bolí.

My son has translated my words
into the only language he knows,

his 2-year-old face, furrowed.
His father (who does not speak

our language) notes my expression,
the change it takes. I explain: he is saying—

your heart hurts,
your heart hurts,

& the small voice repeats it, frowning,
pointing at my chest.

¤

emet ezell

Has Your Spirit Dried Up?

darts and divots—wild javelina in the pit
he tusks the grass when it rains, clumping up

mud and dirt. most people hate javelina: they are looking
for a guru, for a god. but here is

pig. hello pig! pig is perennial and
covered in hair. prickly pear cactus

blooms on his back. yellow petals. blood and
honey. pig bolts across field. pig is

bird without wings. most people want
to be lied to.

my mommy loves me.
sometimes my homeland is pig.

¤

Featured image: Arnold Wiltz. American Landscape, 1936. Gift of G. Evelyn Hutchinson, M.A.H. 1944, Yale University Art Gallery (1991.88.1). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed November 19, 2024.