Erica
Dawson
winner
of the second annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2006
"Erica
Dawson is the most exciting younger poet I've seen in years. What drive and verve!
Even in lines under tight control, she can sound reckless. Her dazzling wit informs
poem after poem, making each seem like a stiff drink with a dash of bitters. Big-Eyed
Afraid is a sensational debut. I can't recall finding this much energy between
two covers since Ariel." – X. J. Kennedy
"Big-Eyed
Afraid is a fast-paced, breathlessly witty and illuminating riff on the multiple
effects of race, sex, biology and social pressure on who we are and how we see
ourselves. Dawson’s dazzling rhymes, her perfect pitch for an array of idioms
ranging from the smutty to the sacred, and her extraordinary combination of metrical
control and jazz-like syntactical elaboration make her work feel at one and the
same time chiseled and improvised, traditional and utterly distinct. Brilliantly
alert to multiple influences yet irreducibly tied to this particular poet at this
particular moment in our collective history, Big-Eyed Afraid is one of
the most compelling and entertaining books of poetry I’ve read in I don’t
know how long.” – Alan Shapiro
Two
poems from Erica Dawson's prize-winning collection, Big-Eyed Afraid
followed
by a note on the author
Doll
Baby
I
was born, Mom says, by the Slice-
N-Tug, Cesarean, just hand-
Picked like
a toy from a trunk – God-tanned
And yet, transparent? ice-
Blue
cord choking a hold
Around my neck. I convalesced
In incubator sheen, undressed
And
darling, I’ve been told.
From
preemie small, I grew
Past grown (“Goddamn Incredible Hulk.”)
I’m
too-short pants and breasts, all bulk,
And nipple peek-a-boo,
Barbie,
and Glamour Do.
I’m Elegance. I’ve seen mom’s scar,
And my
stretch mark of rouge et noir,
The pubescent residue
From
the navel down, from where
I grew – my pigment’s treasure trail
Like
bristle on an alpha male.
But am I debonair
Since
someone told me once,
“You’re big enough to be a man” –
Adam in Eve, all Dapper Dan
And Dressy Bessy? Once,
Twice,
three times a lady? Yes,
Me tall? Yes. Model-like I’ll lie
In a Da
Vinci sprawl (fee fi ... )
And feminine finesse.
I’m
Stretch. I’m doll-like seams
Inside and out. My brain’s in two
Halves
split again. In transitu
My veins shoot blood in beams
Of
brilliant red, the red
Of airbrushed lips, of toy-faced cheeks.
I’ll
flirt in flush because Clinique’s
On sale. I’ll lie in bed
Made-up,
a daydream death
With playtime rigor mortis, id stiff
In still-life
poise, and watch my midriff
Rise, and hear one last breath.
Post
mortem, Mommy’s prize
Will close her eyes and (finally) abstain,
The
Porcelain Princéss, the Chatelaine
Dwindling to average size.
Bees
in the Attic
When
to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things
past
–
William Shakespeare
As
if I’d move enough to make a noise
As loud as theirs, those bees, I circled
around
My whirring bedroom, hurdling children’s toys.
I thought my
lungs would buzz the attic’s sound,
Crescendo,
shh and hum; went round until
I lost my breath, lay down. The ceiling wet,
White
dark with the hive, I dreamt the comb would spill
Its honey on my pink blankets.
When it met
My
lips the plaster lath would crack, and sweet
Dead bees stuck to the stucco
shards would swarm
My face. I’d drown in wings and the petite
Menagerie
with the giant verve. So, warm
And
wrapped, I moved the covers, stood on my toes
And reached, and to this day
nobody knows
I
reached. And to this day nobody knows
The stucco’s crimson dot came from
my tongue.
When helping Mom in our small kitchen, I flung
The spinach-water
and the afterflows
Of
faucet-drips with flicking fingers, throws
To the fogged window above the sink.
They clung,
I waited, for seconds until the window wrung
Itself of green,
steam tears and the glass sang the woes
Of
hissing chicken thighs fried in the cast
Iron pot. And the window sang in Grandma’s
voice,
“Go Down, Moses,” and the stained-glass sugar plum
Fairy
that hung on the liquid pane at the last
“My people go,” raised up
her hands. “Rejoice!”
I heard the bees from there growl in a hum.
From
there, I heard the bees growl in a hum
Everywhere, in Sylvan lilacs that I
picked
For the basement’s dollhouse, singing in the drum-
ming dryer’s
pulse as the washer flowed and clicked.
Their
noise was huge to the pint-sized figurines
Who had no ears, but eye-shaped
mouths. I posed
Their arms and legs in small domestic scenes
Of “Daddy’s
home,” their tiny red door closed,
Their
eye-mouths always open in a gasp
Or scream, as if something were about to fall
Upon
their house like the locust plague. The hasp
Was fastened tight. I knocked
them down, played all
Four
died before the darkness could descend
As if, somehow, I’d write their
perfect end.
As
if somehow I’d write the perfect end
To every moment, tonight, outside
my house
Long left behind, I watch a hydrant douse
A child. And when I let
the darkness bend
Around
me in a blink, I fade to black.
Eyes closed, I eulogize the Harbor’s dock,
Old
Bay, the lit-up Bromo-Seltzer clock
Blue in the smoke from the beacon, the
factory stack,
Night’s
quasi-black against the smoke’s bright white.
The voice inside my head
is talking smack.
The coda of today is just tonight,
No climax, only here
and the bric-a-brac
Of
memories just fond in retrospect.
In them, the spring’s azaleas genuflect.
In
them, that spring, azaleas genuflect,
Wilting, about to die in our little garden;
The
noon sun bores too hot; sweat droplets harden
And case my cheeks as new weeds
bottleneck
The
ants in sidewalk cracks. That spring, I cried
And checked and checked in mania.
I died
My hardest but it never took. No doubt
I didn’t have the guts
to try. But I’d scout
Locations
(tool shed? shower? tub?), and Dad
And Mom, in separate rooms, would sleep
right through
My tiptoed wandering about our blue,
Big siding house. I settled
on the plaid
Of
my own sheets, penning the letter in
My head. It pounded with adrenaline…
It
pounds in my head with my adrenaline.
Dear Mom,
Call me the dummy, the
mannequin,
Dead as the dancer in the box that sings
The Mendelssohn on
the top shelf and rings
With the scope of bells, and vibrates with the sound
Of
clocks. The clock ticks loud as Fall rewound
At every equinox, again and again.
And
when you think of me remember when
I last said Sorry. As the autumns pass
At
quarter to five, the time goes fast, and the grass
Will slow its growth. But
I am huge in your head,
Pounding. And we’re the same. Your blood I’ve
bled.
You’re sleeping in my bed now with my bees.
I’m swimming
in the hollow sound of seas.
And
now I’m swimming in that sound of seas,
The inexhaustible murmur. Now
I’m back
To letters at this desk of letters, keys,
Paper and screen,
your egomaniac,
Dear
critics. The narcissist’s tried “art” inside
This paper’s
looking-glass, distorted, wide
With me and my burned hair, a blistered ember
From
the core of the stove’s hot comb. And I remember
My
silence sweet as canopy beds or a girl
In spinning duchess satin’s whispered
whirl.
Then, all the days ahead were bees in the attic,
The moments still
unseen but heard, ecstatic,
Promising
blood as I stood, now stand, all poise,
As if I’ll move enough to make
a noise.
©
Erica
Dawson was born in Columbia, Maryland in 1979. Majoring in the Writing Seminars,
she received her BA with departmental honors from Johns Hopkins University in
2001. After earning her Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 2006,
she moved south to the University of Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PhD in
English and Comparative Literature as the Elliston Fellow in Poetry. Her poems
have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Blackbird, Sewanee
Theological Review, Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
She has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, including the Academy of
American Poets Prize at Ohio State University. She also took second place in the
2004 Morton Marr Poetry Prize.
