NaPoWriMo Day 9: Estranging the Familiar

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Homecoming Cistern Alien Vessel” by Gabriel …

• 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.

Imagine you’re a visitor to this planet. An alien, an angel, a dimension hopper—you pick.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes, and describe your world from this new, unfamiliar perspective. What would this perspective say about your daily routine? How does this perspective feel about everyday things like eating, smiling, sleeping, or going to work? Make the familiar seem new and different in your freewrite.

Poem: “Homecoming Cistern Alien Vessel” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Oh, my planet, how beautiful
you are. Little curve that leads me
to the lakeside. Let me step out

of the sack of skin I wore
on earth. It’s good to be home.
No more need to name me. No more

need to make the shape of a machete
with my mouth. Pushing up up up the tired
sides that want to drop below my teeth.

Lord, I’ve missed you. The streets
covered all day in light from the moons.
I was confused all the time. I wanted so much.

My hole felt like a gut with an antler
rammed through it. So lonely and strange
and always trying to smile. Coin of the realm.

And my arms open and my life
coming in and out of the “ATM.”
Once I saw a fox leap inside the morning

light and made the same shape
of myself. Once I watched the boats
and also rocked back and forth.

How does every person not cry out
all the time? Yes, it was good to eat
doughnuts. Yes. I was blessed by many

days of joy. A rabbit in the driveway.
A rosemary bush with a sorcerer’s cloak
of spider webs. Brian Eno.

The Hammond B3 Organ that never asked
me who I knew. But that body.
Like a factory. That mind like a ship

built to pile in other bodies. Skin like a
sow without any of the sow’s equanimity.
It reflected nothing. Pink skin. Blue eyes

hard as an anvil. Like a window with covering
that refuses the passerby’s gaze. I loved
the bully power some days. Oh my pleasure

in not causing harm. My pride. I’m not like
so-and-so. My pink skin preaching, my pink skin
yawping out my other hole, “I did not choke

the man with my elbow!” “Would never!”
“I let all the boys in hoodies walk
through dark streets.” “I did not shoot

them with my guns!” The ship rising
up inside me. As if the fox felt pride
for not tearing the bird to pieces. As if

the owl’s heart grew large from not
wrecking the squirrel’s nest. My pink skin
a sail full of indignation. My eyes pitching

across the feed. It is so good to be home
and yet. I have a ship inside. How can
the organ welcome me? I’m not a sow

on her worst day. Which would be what?
Breaking from the barn? Eating all the acorns
and rolling in the mud? No.

Her worst would be at my hands
and on my plate for supper. Grow
like the tree, the man who heals

the bodies said. In every way I became
the ship rising in the harbor.
How can I be welcomed after that?

Estrangement is often necessary for us to reckon with what’s familiar. When we take a step outside of what we know, we often realize that we don’t know what we think we know about what we know—if you’ll allow me a bit of abstraction.

Less abstractly, this poem dazzles me with its perspective. It’s a poem in persona, or in the voice and perspective of someone other than the poet themselves. In this instance, the poet has taken on the persona of a shapeshifting alien leaving Earth, and by training this alien’s perspective on everyday matters of joy and suffering, I leave this poem seeing my own humanity in a different light.

Pay attention to how the familiar becomes strange here. Things we take for granted, such as music and smiles and wanting, seem odd when described so literally. The poem is at its most powerful, of course, when it applies this estrangement to matters of brutality: the violence we inflict on each other, yes, but also the self-congratulation of not inflicting violence. Even matters of money—described as “my life / coming on and out of the ‘ATM’”—have a stark gravity, and the absurdity of daily life becomes all the more apparent.

What should we make of the poem’s ending? The poem’s various metaphors and images collide here in a way that feels dense, particularly the recurring image of the ship, of the “mind like a ship / built to pile in other bodies.” In my interpretation of this poem, the ship is like a vestige of the humanity that the speaker carries with them back to their home planet. This humanity—this vulnerability, this wanting, this need for love, this capacity for violence—makes them a stranger in their own land, and so the speaker is transformed by alienation just as we readers are.

How do you read this poem’s ending? What parts of life felt strange after reading this? Did anything strange suddenly become familiar? Great poetry does this: transforms everything it touches, leaves you with a vision you can’t unsee.

Prompt

Pick something about this world that people take for granted. Something the world is familiar and comfortable with, but maybe shouldn’t be.

Write a poem challenging that thing from the perspective of your free write. Make the familiar feel strange.