levelheaded: Dear American Lovechild,

Robyn Art’s “Dear American Lovechild,” alternates between 11 provocatively described nouns and 11 one-line addresses to those nouns. The poem’s fun, and its literary merit, can be found when trying to link the person, place, thing, or idea being addressed with the statement or question that follows. Let’s take a stab at a few.

Title & Line 1: To think of an “American Lovechild” as a member of some uppity group challenges traditional ideas of America. The U.S. is a melting pot, right? A place where people have for centuries come to find freedom? The word “coterie” itself sends many a reader to a dictionary, suggesting that language–and its ties to education/race/wealth–demonstrates the exclusivity of an allegedly inclusive nation.

Lines 6-7: A “Proponent” of the right to carry a concealed firearm may dream, like all of us, of people in an amorphous world. By asking whether or not that’s actually the case, these lines suggest that a world with weapons is one in which change doesn’t happen, one in which people are dead rather than present.

Lines 16-17: It’s interesting and somehow outrageously sad to think of browsing the internet as frolicking in “the field of blossoming.” Perhaps the sadness comes from the beauty of the language used, the image of what such a phrase might look like in nature, and the knowledge that our Facebook feed doesn’t measure up to either.

For all the strengths of these pairs of lines on their own, they are even stronger in the context of the poem as a whole. The gun owner of line six morphs into the “Survivor Guilt” on display in line 8. Doing load after load of “Laundry. Laundry.” adds up to a heap of “Misspent Youth,” which leads to one being a “Teenage Sad-Sack” who, in his or her loneliness, is or relies upon an “Itinerant Virtual Presence,” then tries with Marvellian eagerness to “reach” and touch something physical, and finally becomes an “Aspiring Xenophobe” who may find life in the sea if he or she doesn’t drown first.

– The Editors