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Milkweed Editions - Kathy Fagan

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76 pages

English

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From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.

Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”

And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

Sujets

Women Authors

birds

General officer

Poetry

General

Family

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Publié par	Milkweed Editions
Date de parution	13 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781571317612
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

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ALSO BY KATHY FAGAN
Sycamore
Lip
The Charm
MOVING & ST RAGE
The Raft
BAD HOBBY
poems
KATHY FAGAN
M I L K W E E D E D I T I O N S
© 2022, Text by Kathy Fagan
© 2022, Cover art by Fritha Strand
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
milkweed.org
Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Tijqua Daiker
Cover art by Fritha Strand
22 23 24 25 26 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fagan, Kathy, author.
Title: Bad hobby : poems / Kathy Fagan.
Description: First Edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2022. | Summary: “Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions about lineage, caregiving, loss, and poetry”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022005010 (print) | LCCN 2022005011 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315458 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781571317612 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3556.A326 B33 2022 (print) | LCC PS3556.A326 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005010
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005011
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Bad Hobby was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
To Bobby
CONTENTS 1 Dedicated Forest Stray Animal Prudence Cooper’s Hawk Farm Evening in the Blue Smoke At the Champion Avenue Low-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center AccuWeather: Real Feel Keelson Dahlia Foreshortening Cognition My Father Bad Hobby 2 Empire Fountain The Rule of Three Helvetica Omphalos The Ghost on the Handle Predator Satiation AccuWeather: Episodes of Sunshine The Supreme Farewell of Handkerchiefs Birds Are Public Animals of Capitalism Personal Item The Children “Where I Am Going”/“I Dare to Live” Topless Mint Morning 3 Latecomer What Kind of Fool Am I Conqueror School AccuWeather: Windy, with Clouds Breaking Window Trace Wisdom Aftermath My Mother Ohio Spring Snow Moon & the Dementia Unit Scarlet Experiment Lucky Star Inactive Fault, with Echoes Notes Acknowledgments
When I was a child, and I imagined a future life with children, I always wound up at the thought that one day I would be an orphan. Part of me looked forward to this time, as though in the moment both my parents had died, I would become like a star in the sky, beautifully and profoundly alone. But if I had children, I would never be that shining thing, enveloped by a darkness, completely untouched. —Sheila Heti, Motherhood
1
DEDICATED
The way I remember it,
I caught beauty
Like a flu,
Via handshake or high five
Or a thank-you-
For-your-service
Between the guys at the VA.
The one who lurched
Toward me, touching
Me, saying:
You like poetry,
More vision than question.
The one who said,
Overhearing me correct
My Korean conflict-era dad:
Go easy, you won t have him
Long. Or the one
Who said: You watch
Him like a hawk;
Just let him go.
In the molecular
Biology lab, each tank
Full of impossibly
Small fish bears
A sign that says: You are responsible
For your own deads.
Plural. Sure.
The older I get, the more
I am reminded of song
Dedications on the radio.
I called Cousin Brucie
To send out “I’ve Got You,
Babe” to my parents
On their wedding anniversary.
When he played them
“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,”
Bob and Mary Anne
Were understandably confused,
But appreciative nonetheless.
I myself have
Had three partners
In my lifetime,
And what I still love best about
Two of them
Is how I never had to explain
That joke. There was all that
Time listening
To radio or TV,
TV turned internet.
I wish I could
Dedicate those spent hours
Now to my mom,
So she could come back awhile.
She wouldn’t have to know
She was dead,
Like we didn’t know then
How much time was passing.
I would play
With her hair like I used to,
And tell her stories until
She began to doze off
Like she used to,
Waking only to say:
I didn’t ever know you
Loved me, Kath. You never
Wanted affection from us, Kath.
Just like she used to.
The wrong song, somehow
The right song, playing on and on,
Like a perfect virus.
FOREST
When I found the tick,
I forgot the rules I’d read:
with thumb and forefinger I severed its body from mine—
just wanting it out of me,
as I’ve heard people say of babies and cancers.
I felt a mix of tenderness and disgust
for it then, like the twin
streams of blood and water
rinsing down the drain.
That summer I used English only
to write poems and speak with my lover,
yet the French insisted on speaking English to me:
You visit forêt? asked the pharmacist
in charge of medical emergencies like mine.
I heard f-o-r-a-y. Foray in a forêt.
Non, I said, jamais.
Not far from there, pears grow
in bottles suspended from the trees
to make a potent digestif.
As long as the fruit remains submerged
in the liqueur, the pear keeps whole indefinitely.
When my mother locked me out—
I was two, and three … —
I’d go to our willow tree,
wrap myself in its whips,
stroke its many sharp eyebrows with my hands.
The pharmacist asked me to
remove my tights to see where
the tick had lodged,
not far from my crotch. Exposed
like that, I thought I should feel more
embarrassed than I did.
I used to believe
I had been preserved by something.
Now I think I am
the preserving spirit—with my leafy fragrance, sound of wings
in the canopy, blood
draining swiftly from the head
as I look up, neither host nor guest. Exile
speaking for one reason only,
and the reason is love.
STRAY
The lamb is bleating circles round the pasture.
He slipped from his enclosure like a soul—
through three fences!—and because he’s still nursing,
his calls draw alarming response from the herd.
He won’t come to me, though I want to help,
this one they call Freezer for his not-distant future,
this one of ginger wool the color and texture
of my dead grandfather’s hair behind his Bible.
And lo, there will be joyful celebration
when the shepherd delivers the stray back to his flock,
the ewe’s teats near to bursting at his return.
How nice the little handfuls of my own
mammal breasts have felt when I cup them,
buoyed up above their human flesh.
You think the space you occupy is large
and then—You think your one life precious—
ANIMAL PRUDENCE
Mice drink the rainwater before dying by
the poison we set in the cupboard for them.
They come for the birdseed, and winter
is so gray here the sight of a single cardinal
can keep us warm for days. We’ll justify
anything—and by we, I mean I, and by
I, I mean we, with our man-is-the-only-
animal-who and our manifest destiny, killers
each of us by greater or lesser degrees.
Instead of a gun or knife in my pocket
there are two notes. Unwhich the//
dandelion, reads one. I don’t know what
it means but cannot throw it away;
it is soft as cashmere. The other says:
coffee, chocolate, birdseed. I should be
extinct by now, except I can’t make it
onto that list either. Like toothpicks
made of plain wood, some things are
increasingly hard to find. Even when he was
a young drunk going deaf from target practice,
my father preferred