NaPoWriMo Day 20: Epistolaries

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “July 10, 2016” by Rachel Mennies

• Divinations

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. Write a letter to someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to. Tell them everything you normally wouldn’t say.

Poem: “July 10, 2016” by Rachel Mennies

Yesterday, Naomi, a man jumped to his death from the bridge beside
  my house.

A runner found his body on the path fifty yards below, lying in a shape 
  I cannot stop imagining.

Does it matter that I once threw pebbles over this bridge to see how fast 
  they'd fall?

I imagined my body the size of a hundred small stones moving in unison.

How I longed for the rocks' silence once they reached the ground.

But I could never lift both of my feet from the earth at once.

Today I press my cheek to the bridge-facing window, feel the sun's heat 
  gathering at the border of the pane.

Today I watch the cut red tulips open towards the waning light.

I have so much more to tell you about being alive.

Divinations

This poem comes out of Mennies’ book Letters to Naomi, a collection of epistolary poems (poems in the form of a letter) to Naomi, a perhaps constructed woman who is the object of the speaker’s desire. The poems are imbued with longing, desire, anxiety, and need, which often works in interesting ways with the topics of the poems themselves.

The topic of this poem is obviously dark—the speaker hears about a man jumping off a bridge and considers her own mortality. This topic combines starkly with the speaker’s own repressed and unmet needs, and it results in some really beautiful, if haunting and troubled, images:

• a shape / I cannot stop imagining

• I imagined my body the size of a hundred small stones moving in unison.

• How I longed for the rocks' silence once they reached the ground.

And those last three lines especially move me:

Today I press my cheek to the bridge-facing window, feel the sun's heat 
  gathering at the border of the pane.

Today I watch the cut red tulips open towards the waning light.

I have so much more to tell you about being alive.

These lines, ironic and honest, are imbued with such dizzying questions. What does it mean that the speaker feels warmth coming from the direction of the man’s death? That she was obsessed with his death in the first place? That dying flowers still tilt towards life? There’s something unresolved in these lines, a tension that strings the speaker towards life—both literally, and in the sense that the poem’s last word is “alive." And what does she have to tell Naomi about being alive? Whatever it is, I end this poem having a sense of what she has to say, even though she, like me, cannot yet put it into words.

Prompt

Write an epistolary poem. Write it to the person you have in mind, even if they never actually read it. Be honest, daring, and vulnerable; say what needs to be said.