Brute Strength

Naomi Shihab Nye chose to highlight this poem, Brute Strength, by Emily Skaja, in her weekly column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on August 25. Nye also noted that U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo selected Brute, Skaja's first poetry collection, to win the Walt Whitman Award for the first-time poets.

In Brute Strength, "Skaja conjures the searing history of a jagged relationship, then mixes a tonic for it: images, elegies and invocations that let the speaker reinvent her human power," Nye wrote. And that, "reinvent[ing] her human power is exactly what Skaja does here.

Silenced, reduced by her experience, denied (or robbed) of agency, Skaja blasts her way out, lifting off from the memories of who she once was, a "witch girl, unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat...girl who wouldn't let a boy hit her"--that girl resurrected in her adulthood, promising to bust out or die trying. But, really, already busted out, no longer mute, writing her own story.

Brute Strength

Soldier for a lost cause, brute, mute woman

written out of my own story, I’ve been trying

to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods & parasitic ash

back to my beginning, that girlhood—

kite-wisp clouded by gun salutes & blackbirds

tearing out from under the hickories

all those fine August mornings so temporary

so gold-ringed by heat-haze & where is that witch girl

unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat, runt

of no litter, queen, girl who wouldn’t let a boy hit her,

girl refusing to be It in tag, pulling that fox hide

heavy around her like a flag? Let me look at her.

Tell her on my honor, I will set the wedding dress on fire

when I’m good & ready or she can bury me in it.

--Emily Skaja

So, a further thought. What's with all the ampersands? Skaja has done away with every "and" that might have occurred here, and why not? Ands don't do much and ampersands look so much more muscular. Do they change the meaning &/or impact of the things they conjoin?

Let's see: There's "swamp-woods & parasitic ash," there's "gun salutes & blackbirds," there's "heat-haze & where is that witch girl," & there is also "good & ready." It's not hard to imagine Emily Skaja, finally good & ready, thinking, "I don't need no stinking' and.

And while we're at scattered postscripts, I have to say that I have a poem of my own that includes respect for witch -girls, notably "Julie Anna, you were a witch baby, wise with foreknowledge."

Here is that poem:

Love to Babies
Nathan Night Rain,

you were an infant with

apple cheeks and patience.

Julie Anna,

you were a witch baby,

wise with foreknowledge.

And Brendan Isaac,

you were king baby

with windmill arms and bicycle legs,

wailing your loud strong music.

As Isaac brought joy

to Abraham and Sarah,

with a handful of weight,

with the heat of new beginning,

with the scent of everything to come,

so have you brought

gift after gift after gift

of Nate asleep on my heart,

warm weight waxing,

innocent of his fierce protector;

of Julie at midnight recalled,

fresh weight needing nothing

but that which was freely given;

of yourself,

urgent and new;

all of you, gift after gift after gift

to a father stirred and grateful

that the elements combined as you.