Kristi Maxwell

Introduction by Ann M. Fine

Before I introduce Kristi Maxwell’s work here we should get gone of a few rag-tag characters lining up at her poems’ doors: empirical, insistent, separating, objectification, resistant (not reticent, that wouldn’t be quite right)…and rid ourselves of a desire to hide on behalf of any of those words. In Kristi Maxwell’s sharply arranged counterspace, there is nowhere to hide anyway, and there is nothing to hide about. Forgetting for a moment the absence of tears, these poems have a righteous rigor, almost Southernly so (I’m thinking Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer—“Thank you, Thank you very much.”) Rid of all those words and your expectations? There, the coach is lighter now.

In the following excerpt from Maxwell’s “A Coach (Turned Into And Turning,” the coach in the title poem is to coach, and if we—me and you (for the following poems I’ll call us readers the laymen-of-the-flanks)—invert our ways of seeing the “some sort of passenger” in this coach, the under-speaker of these poems may actually prove that “news equals.” Deep attention required. But what happens to the layman-of-the-flanks when (s)he brings deep attention to such simply constructed but urgent structures? I can attest that the layman (any like I) will get bit and marked by the poet’s captions. Will the layman (you and I madman, social scholar, meat eater and you too Mr. auctioneer) be rewarded by the revealing of “the cause of glisten”? Note that Maxwell’s “nearby” is a big deal.

Hunger for (among other things digestible) meaning asks us to stare at this politically charged diction openly, allowing that we seers (witnesses or creators?) will likely be passengered incongruously from the scene—albeit in an economical and preferably “green” vehicle—nothing flashy. What do these words want while hushing and hashing themselves out? To unrig our jawbones and how we orally locate ourselves (but not ourselves anymore) in object’s space? Reading these poems I am reminded: fuel is an object. Also, food-as-we-know-it,-but-not-really? Not all coaching is friendly or not, and not always sincere, but it is all so sincere it’s almost dangerous.

You could ask “Can I get a” way? Away, yes. But with deep attention as a sidearm. As in all of Maxwell’s playful, earnest, and trig-anomic writings, it’s a deceptively short ride through a deep trip. Here I may recommend you hold your belly with your dominant hand.

A Coach (Turned into and Turning

It was this scene-y way you had of speaking. How you packed your speech with frames.

The stairs a veritable vegetable – upward & rooting. Where your foot is footed. Where you read the certain hip as a negation of news.

News equals.

You can do that cough all you want.

The kite the dog’s bark designs and how it floats there.

That throw of hush never was knit

that should cover

that should covet the recitation ink sponsored.

Spurned sir or ma’am.

A mouth trots out the carriage of a face.

Seeing is one sort of passenger.

Can I get a

You can do all you want

to kite the hush

to cite the skyward

(sky-lard the portrait

was fat with)

Seeing is one sort

of spur

some flank of truth

is coaxed with.

& We Take as from Marrow

Come now.

We had just finished saying.

Had finished it.

In the bed decked out with sleeping, its attendant vision

fans and fans. We take fat bottles

we take fat jars unto morning and under the belly

to white-out these things with response

and tugging. Each body builds hymns

like machinery, so with purpose. To turn ourselves on

and blast

over the speakers mounted atop

the poles. Good nests.

Our gorging endeavors to separate us

from our hunger

—but to case out and sass excess!

What did we mean by that like a final pledge?

And our teeth we hung against the tendered meat like a caption.

Ours that hang out at the bone

courtesy of and within curtsies we train into our flanks

alongside corporeal. How the bales meant both and either

in the spare molecule of the loft.

Though the auctioneer seldom baffles

our ear box as he used to.

And that

each new crop commands the barracks set at the edge

of needing

we have begun using our fists again

Distorted plows.

We rig the pipes with denim

cinched there

and water

falls into the arena

like a last rose which is compromise

and picked up.

This is our flailing opposition—

this our free pound of grout.

We wear our arms out

like lent jewelry—we

and their glistening

The cause of glisten nearby.

With the import of an amulet,

the shattered

thing lets us in

on its presence.

Gravel we sift through to collect.

Small fins of a boon

eagerly, miserly

we note and grip

that this is final

-ly

a display we will push past

for all angles.

To embrace this

means also to have lodge

and the obstruction potential in that.

The Lost Dungeon

This is mandatory:

that we liken the screen door to pores and slather

springtime there. Month of our fat

conscience we will lean.

Usurp the waistband of days not gone and make them go

like floundering elastic. Skin our gashes

covet from the mangled dowry. We suckle until

the nipple dissolves.

They say we grow

more superstitious. They say our tongues will not

be renewed. When the hallway started

closing us in like colloquialisms, cells dripped down

in that old kind of bulbish light.

Garden of Our

Main Event.

Recordings packaged diligently but gently were passed

between the they that gets a say in our failure.

Artery after artery outdid us—outsourced

to our glorious necks gory-bent

to model the aftermath.

All the delicate flowers affirmed

the crap job of this as our

determined trade.

All the deli-cut flowers

fermented and affixed

to the wolfish gland.

A bandit slaloms topnotch

through the Plural We’ve We’d and

wed to the break.