or can any time become the right time to control
or revoke a birth as on that episode of M.A.S.H.
where the Korean woman swallowed all instinct
to save those on a bus from soldiers trained, like
our soldiers, to overcome reverence?
The title of this poem references Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. The previous stanza mentions Snow White and this stanza alludes to a plot twist central to the record-breaking finale episode of a popular 1970’s TV sitcom. These multiple engagements with pop culture are a recurring device throughout the volume as the poet builds upon familiar imagery and historical events to explore and delineate her themes.
Susan, I don’t mean to be cruel
but as you know it is inevitable. She
once took the boys on a picnic near water
cool and effervescing with motherhood
Another recurring technique in the poetry of Moss is the manipulation of sentence construction to impart emotion. A large portion of this poem recalls an infamous crime from the 1990’s in which Susan Smith drowned her two young boys and invented a racism-fueled story about being carjacked by a black man. As the speaker is recalling these events, she muses about directing confronting the convicted killer. The emotional hesitancy about not wanting to appear cruel is reflected in the spacing of the words in the lines which follow, substitution the tactile imagery of spacing to convey that hesitancy than traditional punctuation like a comma or ellipsis.
One summer day
I took a kettle of steaming water and flooded an ant hill, watched as balled black bodies
floated down my brewed Nile and dried in sand looking sugared, cinnamon-crusted.
Thylias Moss has said that she wrote this volume of poetry with a specific agenda in mind: determining whether humanity exists within the pathological. This agenda accounts for characters appearing like Susan Smith who actually committed infanticide and the allusion to fictional infanticide in the TV show M.A.S.H. A less immediately horrifying example of pathological behavior is the concerted genocide of ants in this poem.
Dr. Frankenstein feeds his son voltage, juice
fires up the hormones
on the day of unkillable testosterone
While Mary and Martha heed their spices,
their urges to preserve, not dulled by the impropriety of the kitchen
in which they slaughter lambs and chickens.
Moss has said of her literary theory “Limited Fork” that it is an direct attempt to write verse in which connections are made that act upon metaphorical implications rather than utilizing the relative lack of ambiguity of the targeted metaphor. This poem is perhaps a realization of that theory as it connects imagery of Frankenstein and the sisters of the Biblical figure of Lazarus with its title to examine the implications of the concept of resurrecting the death. The metaphor is thus implicated as an act of abomination, the brief extension of mortality and the transcendence of the human for into immaterial spirit.
