Suzanne Langlois

May 30, 2017

“Coyote” by Suzanne LangloisPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2017: Editor’s Choice

 

And the Wolf by Laura Jensen

Image: “And the Wolf” by Laura Jensen. “Coyote” was written by Suzanne Langlois for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2017, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

__________

Suzanne Langlois

COYOTE

In the dreams, I look down
at my arms and they are legs.
I do not wear clothing,
but I am not naked.
My mouth opens nearly
from ear to ear and contains
no words. In the dreams,
I don’t need words in my mouth
—my teeth are sharp enough
to speak for themselves,
to take what they want
without asking.

In a den somewhere a creature
sleeps and dreams her body bald.
She howls in terror and strange
sounds come from her throat—
they sound like my god
why have you forsaken me?
She rises to join her people
but they back away snarling
and then turn and run.
She tries to run with them
but they disappear into the trees
and she can not catch
their scent. Her nose is deaf.

In the dreams, I leave
my bedroom through
the claw-torn screen.
I follow an anguished cry
I can hear with my nose.
It leads me to a den where
a naked woman rocks
on her haunches and howls
her aloneness. Her eyes
are wild but her body is not.
It is a trap she will die in.

The dream always ends
the same way—I wake
just as a bullet opens the body
I was wearing a moment ago.
Always, it takes a long moment
before I can move my limbs,
which are numb and stiff,
as though they belonged
to someone else. Always,
I am unable to make a sound
until I do, and then it is
never the sound I expected.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2017
Editor’s Choice

[download audio]

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green, on this selection: “It was the powerful ambiguity of the last lines that sealed it for me, but the poem overall tells a rich and surreal story in very few words, keeping us always slightly off-balance, as the best speculative poetry often does. Who is really dreaming who? This haunting painting deserved a haunting poem.”

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June 7, 2015

“To Caitlyn Jenner” by Suzanne LangloisPosted by

Suzanne Langlois

TO CAITLYN JENNER

Welcome to the club where the first thing anybody notices
about you is where you fall on the continuum of pretty.
Congratulations, you appear to have landed
on the right side of the sorting line
that stretches from beautiful to invisible.
I wonder if you will miss being known
for what you are good at
and not just what you look like—
for what your body can do,
not just what it can wear.
Right now, it seems the magazine covers
all want us to know how you look in a corset.
They’ve lost interest in how fast you can run,
unless it’s how fast you can run in heels.

I realize I am probably creating a false dichotomy
by delineating these different kinds of fame.
Probably, these are both ways of not being known,
of being reduced to a single aspect of ourselves.
Probably, we are all devalued by these shorthand identities—
these heroic epithets that one day become epitaphs.
Here lies Bruce Jenner, American Olympic goldmedalist,
former track and field athlete, husband, father.
Here stands Caitlyn Jenner, LGBT activist,
television personality, transgender woman, mother.

I want to say I would prefer be known for who I am,
rather than for what I looked like or what I did,
but even as I say it, I realize how slippery the word known is.
And isn’t that part of the problem,
the limits of our language—
how we use the same word to mean famous
as we do to mean understood.
And isn’t that the tragedy,
the ways we are misunderstood
as our insides and outsides try to hammer out
some kind of agreement about who we are,
and our language stumbles, trying to catch up
with all of the things we can be.
Maybe that’s how you ran so fast;
you were trying to catch up with the person
you knew you could be.

Caitlyn, I am sorry for my cynicism, and for complaining
that now that you are out as a woman,
the magazine headlines are all about your appearance.
When I actually read the article behind the headlines,
I learned that in your first public appearance as a woman
you will receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
It turns out, there is a medal for who you are.
And I’m sure people will talk about how stunning you look
as you sweep across the stage to stand at a different kind of podium,
but you know, it’s true, you are stunning.
Isn’t it funny, how we use the same word
to mean beautiful as we do to mean amazing.

—Poets Respond
June 7, 2015

[download audio]

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Suzanne Langlois: “This piece is my response to the picture of Caitlyn Jenner on cover of Vanity Fair which seemed to take up the entire internet on Wednesday. I thought the poem was going to rail about how unfair it is that media focuses so heavily on a woman’s appearance. I remember seeing Bruce Jenner’s picture on a Wheaties box as a kid, and when I looked it up yesterday, I found three Wheaties boxes, each one depicting the athlete frozen in an active and triumphant moment. Yet Caitlyn is shown lounging on a couch in her underwear. And yeah, this does make me foam at the mouth a bit. But as I wrote it, the poem insisted on also being about the shift that seems to be happening; how we are slowly expanding the types of accomplishments and qualities we publicly celebrate in people of all genders.”

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