Leveler Poetry Journal
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reset


he decides to ask

if she’s ever followed the dead


her skull bobs a bit like a crane

and he decides she’s pretty       this woman-bound bottom-feeder


she draws out a road map

in ink that could be blood


and says something about

more people being alive today

than ever have died

her beak clicks like the end of a pen

and something of his protrudes


he gets a bit distracted      tickled with a feather

but collects a stable retort

from the furrows in his brow


he quotes french translations

about how cuteness denotes helplessness

and how   dear     existence is only relative                         to sight


i paddle through his little waterways of cleverness

watch crane-girl pack her throat with his trout

and figure he’s got a point



i really should get down

to writing all those letters










dear emily

i have to alphabetize you


dewey never needed numbers for loss

or regret


but these days when names seem to change so freely



when gone looks as good as graved

and when i keep seeing all your surnames


in the faces of women who have big ideas

about speciesism       bleeding out


perfect-scale streetmaps      i end up in mumbles about

how it would have been nice if someone had left me

anything

to discover


i really would have liked to name the mississippi after you


ink out its bends

in the geometries your limbs make from the side


no one would ever question the way

your legs kick through colorado


how the lake of your fist drills

a hole deep into nebraska


or that new streams like fingers

carve through this city with their current


no one would ever

take the time to check


when they could just tell me

what a great map it is

and point to the places they think they’ve been




Jeffrey Allen

levelheaded: reset

 

Glancing quickly at Jeffrey Allen’s “reset,” we see that the poem isn’t punctuated, it’s littered with white space, and there are no capital letters. Of course Mr. Allen isn’t the first or last person to employ these methods. Nonetheless, in an effort to better understand his poem, it’s worth hypothesizing about the reasons behind his chosen typography.

 

The variant shape and lack of punctuation speak to spontaneity. Like the “he [who] decides to ask” at the start of the poem, the speaker himself is looking for “anything / to discover.” As the poem moves from one cluster of words to another, each little thought cloud floats there on its own before drifting into another. All three of these above-mentioned poetic techniques, in fact, contribute an airy quality to a poem that’s heavy at its core.

 

At the heart of the poem is the relationship between its pronouns—“he,” “she,” “i,” “you,” and “they.” After a bitter third-person account of a male/female relationship, “i” finally shows up in line 18. The four italicized words—“loss,” “regret,” “gone,” and “graved”—help us find the root of the poem’s angst. The guy’s hurt. If learning this doesn’t validate the speaker’s tone, we are at least brought to empathize with him. However, this poem isn’t merely a plea for someone to feel bad for its author. It challenges us to feel for ourselves. More on that in a sec.

 

First, let’s revisit this “i.” The decision to leave the first person pronoun lowercase could be simply attributed to stylistic preference. Regardless, this tactic also does things. On the one hand, it puts the self on the same plane as the rest of the words in the poem—no more important, no less. It could also be argued, though, that this very decision to leave “i” lowercase actually does the opposite; that is, rather than leveling (yeah—we said, “leveling” and our journal’s called LEVELER) the playing field, leaving “i” uncapitalized calls more attention to the word. Could it be that Allen wants to do both things at once?

 

When the author decided not to capitalize or punctuate, when he decided to scatter his poem about the page, it’s as if he makes an effort to fling the “road map,” the “perfect-scale streetmaps” to the wind, knowing full well that the window is closed. Then, in the process of complaining about being unable to discover and name the Mississippi, he magically creates the “mississippi,” likening its twists and turns to violent acts of the body. The window’s closed, but the door’s open.

 

We love routines because the unknown can be so frightening. How many of us have seen a map and pointed to where we’ve been, rather than the places we could go? We are the “they” at this poem’s close. Arthur Miller once said, “I write as much to discover as to explain.” We’re guessing Jeffrey Allen does, too.

 

 

– The Editors