Poetry: “Self-Portrait” by Ian Powell-Palm
There’s a dream-like quality to Ian Powell-Palm’s “Self-Portrait.” It’s hard to pin down precisely what about this poem is so arresting, but the tone, the mood, the state of mind—all of these swirling, intangible and ephemeral characteristics manage to haunt the reader long after they have forgotten everything else about the poem and where they encountered it. Powell-Palm’s poem is like a splinter under a fingernail, violent in the images it offers and then takes back—the knife, the steel of the knife, the flames and the black night that swallows them. It’s difficult to tell what is real in this poem, what is real and what is imagined, what is remembered, what is invented, and what is the truth. But the truth isn’t necessarily the point. It’s not the kind of self portrait most people would want, but look a little closer, and you might see it, or hazard a guess, the speaker isn’t pushing the reader away in the manner we think they are. Maybe, just maybe, it’s something else. Maybe the violence, that’s the point. Maybe we need the violence, so when the violence ends, the hope that is offered, the hand that Powell-Palm offers us, the way out, maybe the brutality of the images we are given makes the escape that much more of a relief.
Self-Portrait
The only goal was to echo God,
With each heartbeat.
It was like Wyoming: how the grass lay down and sang.
How you could feel that there were lungs, actual lungs,
Underneath those black hills.
How we rolled past.
How we cried with it.
It’s all noise. My father, with a hammer
Standing outside the chicken shed, his arms on fire.
Not literally- but imagine them so. Burning
With grace. Me, four years old,
tracing the sinews like they were constellations.
Like I could see that deep. Trying to turn his flesh into a map
That would take me back inside him. To know more than
The distance gravity kept between us. To sit in the living room of my father’s best-kept secrets
And be saved. Like I said- everything I love is pure noise.
Pure throttle, shock, dismember.
Remember the black trees on that black hill? There was a grey doe
Made blue by the moon.
That’s how I want you.
Blue and sure. Blue as in
Morning with an edge. A bruise
Made soft by our living.
I wanted to make soft our living-
Take the steel out of the knife.
Put it back in the kitchen of our heart.
Make bread with all we have, instead
Ian Powell-Palm
Ian Powell-Palm is one of the few born in the colonized state of Montana. He is the founder of the literary magazine Rejected Lit and is a PhD Candidate at UMass Amherst. His poetry interrogates familial trauma, sexual identity, and the resurrection of the dead. He is equally sad and joyful for many strange, disparate things. He wants you to stand against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians with all you have and to fight for a free Palestine. There’s a lot more to say, but this is enough for now.
