Given to Rust
Every time I open my mouth my teeth revealmore than I mean to. I can't stop tonguing them, my teeth.Almost giddy to know they're still there (my mother lost hers)but I am embarrassed nonetheless that even they aren'tpretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it movedthrough the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning,like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterdaya woman closed her eyes as I read aloud andshe said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice.I can still sing some. Early cancer didn't stop the compulsionto sing but there's gravel now.An undercurrent that reveals me. Time and disaster. A landslidedown the mountain. When you stopped speaking to mewhat you really wanted was me to stop speaking to you. Tostifle the sound of my voice. I know.Didn't want the quicksilver of it in your ear What does it meanto silence another? It means I ruminate on the hitof rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listenall day until the water rusted its way in. And there I wasputting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.
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- November 2, 2023
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“Given to Rust” from The Shared World: by Vievee Francis.
Published by Northwestern University Press in April 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Vievee Francis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (WSU, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection (Northwestern University Press, 2006), Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Award) and The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023). She most recently received the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Harvard Review, Best American Poetry (2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2022), spin.com, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Both a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow she has served as an Associate Editor for Callaloo. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
“Vievee Francis is, undoubtedly, one of the most compelling poets alive and writing today. In her fourth book, The Shared World, she charts a course of how entangled all of our lives are in today’s world. Who do we share the world with? Who do we ignore? What does it mean to live so closely in proximity to each other and to have such deeply complicated histories? At the heart of this book is this truth: what is the telling, and how do we go about the ways of doing so? With bravery, Francis peels back the layers, not leaving a simple understanding but instead, by the telling, examining the complications of what it means to tell.” —Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us: Poems
“When I say Vievee Francis is one of the finest living American writers, I say it without hyperbole. Each of her poems is a revelation. They embody Lorca’s idea that duende is about self-discovery, of excavation through image and the imaginary. Not for the self, but from the self. Few poets can write with her earned grace.” —Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World
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