green girl

Praise for green girl: 
 
In the searing poems of green girl, Jessie Sobey calls on the language of Shakespeare to help tell a story we are coming to know all too well: of how a young girl or woman suffers harm to her heart and mind, and body, at the hands of boys and men. Her aim, she writes, is “to change the green girl’s narrative: not to do the impossible & change what has happened, but to show the secret parts.” A poet’s work is to put us inside experience, to feel it asexperience, to hold a complex mirror up to it, to name it. green girl does this with the bravery of candor. What begins with “no remedy for a trauma / that cannot be undone” arrives at:
 
               so here’s a promise:
 
               my injuries are just a sport to you
               but it is from there      
 
               that I write
               & will speak truth into the public’s ear.
 
Harrowing, vertiginous, haunted, the poems in green girl excavate the image of Ophelia, fracturing her into prismatic bits—sister, self, drowned, undrowned, resurrected, never-dead, survivor and ghost, the one who’s been silenced and the one who speaks. This fierce book interrogates the idea that “I am not what I am” in ways that linger, challenge, and disrupt.
—Laurie Sheck
 
Sample of the poems: 
 
a divided duty
The place where it started — a turning point, 
to put it mildly — isn’t mine to make a shelter in 
 
I’m told the entire center is like a field
that will fallow if I enter.
 
Now in double-exile I start to wonder
how I can still love what I should hate, except
 
I am not what I am
 
arms & legs crudely sutured like mismatched socks
seepage pooling in the furrow — 
 
the constant static of something else’s grim memories
kept behind lidless eyes    so I’ll not sleep tonight.
 
I scrub with vinegar the veiny tapestry
until it’s hot & harlot-red. Listen — 
 
I am not what I am
 
all day I’ve been
playing house with a stranger
 
a reverse blur of nose, cheek, hair
a rumor, a fracture, a slattern who asked for it
 
on the leather couch, where the mark I left — 
a green inkblot — even that’s not there.
 
I am not what I am
 
this bleating, antic figment
strangles the flower necks to frolic with the dead, smiles
 
when the scissors in its hand
appear in mine instead
 
says the bruised heart must be pierced through the ear — 
take the blade & find your shelter there.
 
I will play the swan
There’s a secret      kept distal
in bath-warm tears I muffle
 
just here in my full-length mirror
that’s always never right.
 
What’s me
that wasn’t you
 
when the original taken out 
looks slanted, rippled grim as
 
the last words you wrote: Return 
to Sender.
 
Spring meltwater 
bathes the pondweeds 
 
in a late-dripping sun.
Someone’s about to find
 
where the bodies lie — 
like scabbed pecans
dropped from their branches.
 
With what violence
you first loved me — 
 
in this selfsame pool
the nests reamed & feather-full.
 
Death is our physician
I only really knew you
in the winter — 
 
it’s nearly fall — storm-birthed leaves
pool a soggy ochre
 
that cataracts
across this clammy deck
 
the grass below cloud-cold, bent
the last sweet tomatoes
 
pink-green, belly-split
hang like doll parts
 
over squash flowers
that prickle my hardened skin.
 
How many times you walked up
the ice-banked stairs –
 
after, I dashed your footprints
too fancy for the snow that gathered there.
 
If it were now to die — 
not like a season that’s passed
 
or the once-manic anthill
its cadent bowels washed out its side
 
but how we might
throw out our eyes 
 
to console them
& steal away, so guilty-like.