levelheaded: West Virginia

Even if our feet are firmly planted from the beginning in “West Virginia,” Hecker so adroitly and deliberately studs several deeply questioning pearls into his poem that we are left soberly disoriented.

THE PLACE/PLACELESSNESS PEARL

Hecker starts by setting up a calculated inevitability: “Whenever a woman leaves our state forever, / a mine entrance explodes beside a riverbed.” Indeed, West Virginia contains mines, and the 2010 mine disaster, which killed twenty-nine miners, comes to mind here. Instead of safety violations causing the explosions in the poem, though, the culprit is the departure of that state’s women. When the poem’s blasts occur, the natives are moved “closer to the Atlantic ocean, [and] / mineral slabs we scaled as kids are now sandy beach.” Geography unsettles and shifts; it is unreliable. It’s not by chance that “Bill” appears in the poem, and then that the “last correspondence Mary needs is a final- / notice bill.” This pun nods to the disruptions to lingual geography that we navigate as we go from day to day. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which appear at the end of the poem, are said to have been destroyed by several earthquakes.

THE NECESSARY/THE BLOOD PEARL

“Blood platelets & extended families stream / to the disaster area”—blood platelets* to treat the trauma victims? Or has the explosion so confused us that, in a kind of hyper-aware state of shock, we feel that we can zoom in on the displaced platelets as they saturate this patch of West Virginia? Hecker, a centrifuge, separates out from the larger unit these cell fragments, as though they have free will—like the women, who represent the state’s lifeblood (How will the population continue without women to bear new West Virginians?), who leave “forever.” Back to “the last correspondence Mary needs”: What a bizarre-o saying, which actually means you don’t need the thing, right? Then, on this unwritten list of needs, why does it appear at all (“last”)? Is the weird implication that everything is necessary, in some way or another? “Bill carries a cooler upon his shoulder & it’s not filled / with organ donation”—organs that could be the difference between life and death in the wake of a blast—but he needs whatever’s inside anyway, or someone does (even if it’s nothing, since a smooth line break initially signals that the cooler is “not filled”). All of West Virginia’s women are necessary, to prevent these terrible explosions. It’s no mistake that Hecker zeroes in on mines, with their possessive echoing, as he describes what happens when the women go.

THE FREE-FLOWING PEARL

So we’ve seen this poem’s bloody sheen. But in addition to blood, and to the Atlantic Ocean, “Mary & Bill comment on the perversive nature / of displacing fluids,” when they spot an Archimedean Screw. They are commenting on the screw, yes, but also on transfusions in general. There’s error and falseness in displacement, in pouring from one container into another (see: the stream of women pouring themselves from WV to another state). Since the Hanging Gardens were supposedly terraced, some researchers postulate they were irrigated with an Archimedean Screw. The poem is topically fluid, and it’s unsettled and unsettling in its behavior, too.

“Don’t tell Mary,” says the speaker, about the figurine from her mailbox. To a protective end, maybe, the speaker, the reader, and Bill form an enclave. The final sentence of the poem, however, instructs us not to “tell Mary or Bill.” Bill has disappeared from the group, a testament to the fluidity of being. One minute you’re here, sweating blood, working, living—the next, not.

– The Editors

*Did you know that every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood, and that your donation can save up to three lives?