Poetry: “first winter in iowa city” by Jeremy Teddy Karn
Jeremy Karn’s work in “first winter in iowa city,” initially feels tentative, as this speaker navigates the boundaries of this new relationship and the boundaries of intimacy and culture that seem to fluctuate between speaker and subject, but by the end of this deliberate and lyrical poem, we see hope glimmer, the speaker stepping away from narrative and into an epistolary mode, telling his subject of his deep gratitude and depth of feeling. The poem travels to many different and difficult spaces, but Karn is able to navigate with a controlled yet tender voice and an honesty that leaves a reader breathless and shaken in its scope.
first winter in iowa city
my original calling is to love
women who don’t love me now my calling is to remain unfaded
women who don’t love me now my calling is to remain unfaded
the bathroom’s neon blue light crawls
two nude bodies moth under it our post-coitus physiques glint
the room is semi-warmed
packs of condoms lay torn on a fluffy rug
others are plastic-wrapped— waiting to be picked—
i am too timid to look into her brown eyes
everything now revolves around prevention
the dread of being a young mother after the pregnancy scare—
outside
neighbors shovel snow over snow over snow—
only corpses can be shoveled like that in my country i say
she asks me to repeat myself without my Liberian accent
that sometimes border us
i reach for her mouth and drag my tongue inside hers
to teach her
a tongue that isn’t here to lose its accent
a tongue that isn’t here to lose its accent
with her my body animates — that is to say it is now the bone of her bones
flesh of her flesh f or i find life out of her
i want to be saved by a woman
alleluia
snow continues to rug lawns spreading across wooden steps
her cat meows at the sight of my naked body
the bed sheet as a long tail crawls behind me
i am spending my first winter in Iowa City with you—
isn’t that strange? i ask—
isn’t that strange? i ask—
she answers with a smile and goes back to reading— s elected poems by anne sexton
“suicides have a special language” she reads
“suicides have a special language” she reads
i don’t carry this language with me when i enter her tenderness
i had carried this language for many nights
lying awake praying it away
before it romanticized a fading body
“a body is more beloved when it is alive
than dead” — my mother once said
snow stops
flurries begin
two hours now since the power
outage restored
the apartment is now cigarette-smoked— my hand is warmed
with a steamed coffee mug
my girlfriend feeds the cat in the kitchen the same way
she feeds life back into me
cat’s meows are soft songs my cries remain hard
she listens to the violence in them at night
with her my life is coming back to me
like a prodigal son to a father
i think your true calling is to keep me alive
i whisper— as she leaps on the couch next to me
Jeremy Karn
Jeremy Teddy Karn is a Liberian poet and an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His chapbook, Miryam Magdalit, was chosen for inclusion in the New-Generation African Poets' Chapbook Boxset (APBF), 2021. His work has been widely published in several journals and magazines.
