Community Feedback: Banishment Spell for my Titties by Patricia Frazier
Community Feedback is our recurring column that provides an opportunity for our audience to get some quick, free & exceptional feedback on a new poem.
It works like this: we keep open the category for everyone to submit a poem in progress.
Meanwhile, our editorial staff selects a poem to critique and comment on.
We publish the poem and the comments once every month, and repeat the process.
Submit your poem here.
This month, we chose Patricia Frazier’s poem, “Banishment Spell for My Titties.” Thank you to all of our submitters.
Banishment Spell for My Titties
..our disregard
For dust. Small worlds unwhirl in the corners of our homes
After death. —Terrance HayesI unhook my first training bra.
I take back your silly names.
You are no longer
centerpieces, cherry picked, plucked straight from Momma’s.
No longer pit stops for not-yet
lovers. how many black boys have been saved
by your buoyancy & chewed you up
like inconsiderate sharks guilty of blood?
Skin squealing between the teethyet no one believes
how insidious plain sight can be.
I offer my first tampon as libation
I want the eyes of catcallers and bystanders
I want the tongues of hasty pediatricians.
I want the fingers of curious congressmen
making what they will of my underwear drawer
and calling it protocol. dark magic is different name
for a prison. Brassiere struggling make to fantasy
the noise my stiffness makes. back you go:
to them you’re a myth. an old wives tale.I won’t let the world have my titties, your soft spots
a benediction for the wrong sermon.
I call upon the sweat of late bloomers.
to grant you the curse of sanctuary.
Nipples inverting until there’s nothing left.
I am not the state sanctioned violence
that sold my grandmother to breast cancer
and named controlled consumption welfare
but it taught me to make queendoms of emptiness.
I summon the tricks of my arch nemesis, the hellfire of a coverup,
bless my titties with a cloak of ash, the power of a grocery store
never built. Proof that absence isn’t evidence of an incapacity
for violence. Maybe my titties will become dust assassins
shroud in the sneeze that stops brett kavanaugh’s heart.
Maybe returning my loved ones to God is the best protection I can offer.
Maybe limbo is a place we can prepare for war in peace.
I send you onward with a strand of my mother’s
chest hair for all of it’s prophecy. I hex my enemies
with your disappearance, an infinity of searching for words to fit
the frightening static that has taken your place.
Only my heart beat interrupting this sweet, sinister stillness.
What Poems Can Do To Our Language
Matthew Zapruder writes in Why Poetry,
“The usefulness of poetry has less to dow with delivering messages (which we can just as easily get from prose), and far more to do with what poems can do to our language, reenlivening and reactivating it, and thereby drawing us into a different form of attention and awareness.”
Poetry has certain work assigned to it, certain expectations; poetry is the place we return to when language itself has shown up dead, apathetic. Like Christians putting bread in theirs, we put words in the mouths of our poems because we want them to be alive again—we believe in the magic that makes them alive again.
Ms Frazier may be a young poet, our second National Youth Poet Laureate, but her poetry tightly focuses on the same work we expect from all great poets. Revealing the magic that makes language alive again.
On Crass Tit(le)s
Let’s talk a minute about crass language in poetry. When I first began to read Frazier’s submission, I was apprehensive. As an Editor of a public platform, I’m always thinking of the moral quality of what we publish. Is this poem doing good, or is it doing bad? Often, poets will use crass language for shock value, for an easy and shallow emotional reaction from the reader. I understand the urge: so much of our formal education around poetry is just that, formal. Poets, I’d hazard a guess, are a rather rebellious group, and an easy rebellion against formality is crass language. Say hello to the teenagers on the back of the bus.
But a rich depth can and ought to be explored with crass language as well—so many important questions to explore, often political: who gets to define “crass language”? how does “crass language” become a weapon of oppression? how does “crass language” become a weapon for the oppressed?
Frazier’s poem, titled so that it’s deliberate crass is undeniable, works to explore not just the word “titties,” but even more so the language she employs around the phrase. This isn’t a shock-jock use of a naughty word. “Banishment Spell for My Titties” thrusts—carefully, thoughtfully—crassness into the walled fortress of religious language and imagery.
The title then, full of “Titties” as it is, is near perfect—the reader is faithfully setup for the journey. Perhaps though the phrase “Banishment Spell” could point more accurately toward the religious tones of the piece: “Psalm for My Titties”, “Forgive the Sins of My Titties”, etc.
The Foretold Reenlivening
I became convinced that this poem elevates language once I immersed myself in its old testament motifs—the libations, the blood guilt, the offerings. Much of the phrasing seems like it could be lifted wholly from the Psalms of the Bible.
Ms Frazier here avoids another common pitfall—religious language poems can quickly become sentimental and single-note. While the original psalms are tremendously complex worship poetry, poets in our slush often gloss over the full complexity of religious feeling in order to reproduce a specific note of sentimentality: a message of forgiveness, peace and love. Ultimately, an example of the process by which language becomes inert and lifeless.
The psalms are not simple messages of forgiveness, peace and love, and neither is “Banishment Spell for My Titties.” Ms Frazier works hard here to make complex and ambivalent the generated religious feelings. In the middle of the first stanza sits a great example:
I offer my first tampon as libation
I want the eyes of catcallers and bystanders
I want the tongues of hasty pediatricians.
I want the fingers of curious congressmen
making what they will of my underwear drawer
and calling it protocol.
Like the word “titties”, tampons are excluded from the language of church. But what makes this moment fresh is the turn that follows.
Our speaker first offers her tampon, presumably bloody, as sacrifice—a subversion of submission—, but then demands the body parts of others. Frazier reverses roles in the blink of the eye, from supplicant worshipper to demanding divinity. This new God wants eyes, wants tongues, wants fingers, wants a new political reality in which women are not made into sacrifices for catcallers and congressman. So good. This is how old language becomes new.
As a minor note, I think this powerful and fresh moment could be signaled a little clearer with punctuation or white space—the run-on quality it has now serves to underwhelm the turn.
Transformational Politics
The journey of the word “titties” across this poem could be a synonym for the journey that many young poets are familiar with. The speaker’s “centerpieces, cherry picked” break down the doors of an old sanctuary to demand a position and a place usually exclusionary—just as the new guard of poets is breaking down old languages, old understandings, old clubs of our poetry community.
Living in a political world, our poems cannot help but be political themselves. Ms Frazier shows us here how to weaponize crassness by making it tender, aggressive, and life-affirming—a politics I want to get behind. I can’t wait to see more of what’s to come from this new generation of poets.
A Few Further Notes
- Generally, I think there is some room to cut/rephrase in this poem. As they are, some lines only slow the momentum, add weight. A few spots where I felt slowed down: “dark magic is different name / for a prison.” — “I summon the tricks of my arch nemesis, the hellfire of a coverup” — “Maybe my titties will become dust assassins / shroud in the sneeze that stops brett kavanaugh’s heart.”
- I like the ending, but “heart beat” can be a really cliche phrase. Maybe choose something a little fresher that breaks the sinister silence.
- Get consistent on punctuation. Capitalization and end-punctuation didn’t seem entirely deliberate or careful.
- Make sure your phrasing is not a burden for the reader: “Brassiere struggling make to fantasy / the noise my stiffness makes.” I don’t quite understand what’s happening in the phrase “struggling make to fantasy”
Thank you so much Patricia for sharing your work with us and inviting our deep thinking and feedback on your words. It was sincerely a pleasure.