Failure to Thrive by Carol Muske Dukes

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 7, 2014   Failure to Thrive   Carol Muske-Dukes

O the body’s much ballyhoo’d right to be born! Aligning with her right to shine & die, a star! They all know her name but not her age A doctor our daughters shared, opined. Her name, he said, was failure to— (Thrived onscreen, you’ve seen her.) My daughter towered above her in real Life. Born on the same day, they might notice you at the edge of the field with your banners and bottled cells? A managed tot, from the womb unstoppered, Brained-up for the stupids. Don’t grow! Don’t rise into big citizenship! Soul underling, soul malingering at the gate! Till the end of  the body’s time: Unicorn, my little porn. Wanted To unhunger her too, I. But she filled the screen in that field of dying flowers. Famous-eyed, turned away from the gift of sustenance, brave: no semblance of a future beyond everyone’s fake-maternal mind. Liars’ banners. Then the unicorn’s  passage: lightfoot. And so loved, lightfoot, so apparently loved: Some of us must starve in order to be seen.            Copyright © 2014 by Carol Muske-Dukes. Used with permission of the author About This Poem   “This is a hard poem to talk about for a number of reasons. I think the poem has to tell its own story. Though, to a certain extent, ‘this really happened’—I’ve taken certain fictionalizing liberties in the matter of the child actress who is ‘featured’ here.  The poem is, in fact, about something beyond her. It’s a poem about a woman’s right to choose, about her right to control her own body in the matter of reproductive rights. The mother who was ‘starving’ her daughter so that she might continue to embody the ‘ideal’ of being a child forever (on-screen) is a horrific aside. The real subject of the poem is what we believe about ourselves as mothers, as parents—and our assumption of the right to bring children into this world.” —Carol Muske-Dukes   Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of Twin Cities (Penguin, 2011). She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and New York City. Most Recent Book by Muske-Dukes   Twin Cities (Penguin, 2011) "Measurement Fable" by Rusty Morrison "Beasts" by Carmen Giménez Smith "Reasons to Survive November" by Tony Hoagland Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038