pressing spirals
sure this skin is like ‘i don’t even know how to begin’
the roads to my arteries all mudpath / all sillyputty
i trafficjam inside myself / name you mountain
and you whisper ‘well come on in’ / coo flashlights
in my blackout / my kneecaps mouthing / ‘yes please
i want that’ / still stuck / still muffled and mumbled
in my own snowdrift / my own pinball kind of think
my shaking storm hands / my forest tongue / you tell me
protection spell / language me layercake / swear a tiny god
must be in each of your thumbs / you pressing spirals
to my ears / they sound of blanket / of acceptance draped
on shoulders / so tonight / so tonight in my chest / we push
this wagon / this wheeled stovepan full of longing / we kiss
it with lips downhill / lose it somewhere in the river / we two
jawlines / together / we chew on our wanted winter.
| John Mortara |
|
levelheaded: pressing spirals
The forward slashes in John Mortara’s “pressing spirals” create pauses within each of the poem’s 15 lines, calling attention to certain phrases and their associations with the ones around them. The slashes also often serve as replacements for commas or periods, showing that the speaker’s “trafficjam inside” himself, his “pinball kind of think” isn’t beholden to rules of grammar and usage. As a result, Mortara’s poem feels urgent, spontaneous.
We read “pressing spirals” as a love poem. The poem’s “you,” whose presence is as big as a welcoming mountain, makes the speaker so weak in the knees that they say “‘yes please / i want that.’” Whereas the speaker is prisoner to the complexity of language (“my forest tongue”; “language me layercake”), his love interest affords him something resembling peace by a physical act devoid of words: “pressing spirals” to his ears.
Perhaps “pressing spirals” refers to listening to seashells, or maybe it means something else entirely. Regardless, what’s clear is that the impact of this experience is overwhelmingly positive, like “acceptance draped / on shoulders.” The subsequent repetition of the phrase “so tonight” demonstrates that this new found feeling has brought the speaker to seize the present moment, and as a result the “stovepan full of longing” is kissed into oblivion.
In the poem’s close, Mortara uses metonymy—“jawlines” standing in for people—to help show how the physical presence of another can help alleviate mental anguish. As the couple “chew[s] on [their] wanted winter,” their mouths are presumably too pleasantly full to speak.
– The Editors
