A Close-Reading of Tiana clark's  tim

The following poem originally appeared in Frontier Poetry, in which it won the 2017 Frontier Open Poetry Contest.

​I don't know what happened          that night.
I was barefoot          sprinting           across a field of damp grass
and then I wasn't.                                I was kissing a man—then I wasn't.
I was on a twin bed and then          and then...and then I was
blank—prone                                         on the dumb floor of a dorm room--
then I...I don't know                          what happened to my panties.

                         Do you know what happened
                         to my panties?

            Who took                             them off--
            Who entered                       my body w/o asking--
            Who saw                               my cold nipples and said nothing--
            Who saw                               taupe watercoloring the rim
                                                               of my eighteen-year-old breasts--
            Who broke                           my beaded black dress--
            Who keeps the hours       I can't remember?

If faceless men came          into that room          then they have no names
and if I could scream          into that room          I'd shout: Talitha kum!
meaning                                   Little girl,                         I say to you, get up!

~~~

Look deep inside the eye of a baby goat,
said Jessica, her command hung
at the back of the barn, lush imperative.

I gazed the animal eyeball, needling
the horizontal iris, its pupil so alien
from mine, a frazzled bleat cut

like the black bar inking the slit-shaped eye.
But there was another baby goat I called Tim
who was screaming at the seam of a corner

and when I approached                      he ran away.
                                                I knew why.

~~~

Because                     there are hours in my life
I cannot                    remember
              that I don't want                       to remember
                                                                       and if I did

       I would have slaughtered Tim

and Tim smelled          this petite terror     on my hectic hands,
breath, and pits            spilling                        black grease from my pores
like gasoline                   slick,                            savage with pheromones

and every time              I crunched one foot      closer
on the dank bed           of matted hay                   and morning mud
to zip the space             between us                       he kept leaping

and running,
                                            breaking away
                                                                                          from fear.


​                                                                      Tim, come here.

Tiana Clark's debut collection of poetry, I Can't Talk About The Trees Without The Blood, which features this poem, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her website is ​http://www.tianaclark.com/ and she can be found on Twitter @TianaClarkPoet

This poem was originally published in Frontier Poetry, where it won the 2017 Frontier Open Poetry Contest. 

close reading

by Guest Contributor torrin a. greathouse

​I am eternally interested in the potential of form, the ways in which critical consideration of whitespace and lineation can expand the possibilities of poetry as a narrative form. Particularly, I am interested in the ways poetry, by way of formal allowances for gaps and dissonances, can capture traumatic memory, which is exactly why I am so enamored with Clark’s “Tim.” It pushes the contrapuntal to perhaps not only its logical conclusion, but also near to its breaking point.

The first of the poem’s three sections can be understood as four stanzas, three of which are contrapuntals. Not only does this enact a visual fragmentation upon the page, it means that this section can be read in 28 different ways. The memory of being sexually assaulted arrives to the reader in fragments, and then, with each successive reading, becomes more clear. The question “Do you know what happened / to my panties?” answered by both “Who took / Who entered / Who saw” and “them off— / my body w/o asking—,” which then becomes “Who took them off— / Who entered my body w/o asking—.” But still, even when read in totality, the first section of Clark’s poem does not offer a tidy memory, instead a narrative of questions answered by other questions.

The poem’s second section is more formally grounded, its series of exacting tercets leading to a couplet fragmented with whitespace. Even in this more classical form, the poem is gesturing at the movement of traumatic memory, of repression. The story here seems more complete, yet orbits around the undescribed violence of the baby goat’s throat being slit. The imagery of the goat’s “horizontal iris,” its bleat “a black bar” to the “slit-shaped eye,” even the “seam” of the corner, evoke the physical form of this severing. Then, when we arrive at the final couplet, the whitespace enacts it, so that when we read “I knew why,” the reader is as viscerally aware of the anticipated act as both the speaker and the goat.

Oftentimes, a poem which formally innovates must contend with the expectation of teaching the reader how to read it. Perhaps my favorite formal movement in this poem is how its final section both conforms to, and subverts, this expectation. Once again, the poem fragments into contrapuntal, but this time the separation between the columns and the violent memories they recount is less clearly defined. In a single column, two moments blur into one, “Tim smelled / breath, and pits / like gasoline // and every time / on the dank bed / to zip the space // and running, / breaking away,” while when read across, the bed is recreated as one “of matted hay and morning mud.” Likewise, while the third column could be read as the speaker being chased after the sexual assault from the poem’s first section, the lines “savage with pheromones // closer / and the morning mud / he kept leaping” topple imperfectly down toward “Tim, come here.” This utilization and disruption of the previously established form allows it to further imitate the motion of traumatic memory, the slippage between two moments after a trigger. What Paisley Rekdal so eloquently describes in her essay, “Nightingale: a Gloss,” as “the now of terror… breaking back through the crust of one’s consciousness.”

Ultimately though, despite the great violences that occupy and rupture the form and narrative of this poem, it is a poem driven by mercy. By the questionable mercy of being unable to (fully) remember the violence endured. The mercy of being unable to slaughter Tim. The attempted mercy of screaming into the past to save a former self. The way that somehow, the mercy of forgetting, the longing to save oneself, precipitate another mercy, prevent another violence. So that when the final phrase is uttered, complete, isolated on the page, “Tim, come here,” we know that he will find the speaker’s arms unscathed.

torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer trans womxn & cripple-punk from Southern California. She is the author of boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018) & winner of the Peseroff Poetry Prize, F(r)iction Poetry Prize, & the Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest with Linette Reeman. Their work is published/forthcoming in POETRY, The New York Times, Muzzle, Redivider, BOAAT, & The Rumpus. When she is not writing, her hobbies include awkwardly drinking coffee at parties & trying to find some goddamn size 13 heels.

​torrin a. greathouse's debut chapbook, "boy / girl / ghost" can be ordered here.