100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  The poem starts with a declaration and a violent line break at the end of the first line: “She wasn’t watching when they cut him / Out.” The second line halts abruptly after that first word, and then picks up again in an oddly offhanded manner, as if the poet—or the speaker—is talking intimately to the reader: “C-section, you know.” The green drape cuts her off from seeing herself giving birth.

  The next lines turn the poem into a sort of parable. Notice the hissing s sounds that tie the words together: “He spilled / Out squalling, already starving.” The push of the line enacts the feeling of the baby spilling out from his mother. The phrase “already starving” is the first hint of the baby’s need, the son’s future addiction. The s’s continue and now alliteratively blend with the letter t. The sound is especially aggressive in the sound of the letters sti in the crossover of “Still” to “Stitching.” Listen again to get the full effect of a sentence that holds off the subject and verb: “Still / Stitching her up, they fastened him / To her breast so he could feed.” It all happens so quickly. She is still being stitched back together from her C-section when he is already fixed on her.

  The next lines are the heart of the poem: “There / He rooted for the milk, so lustful / In his sucking that weeping roses / Grew from the edges of her nipples.” Here Daniels turns a baby’s natural lust for the mother’s breast into a sign of future addiction. He sucks and bites so hard on her nipples that they fester into wounds. The baby is draining his mother, making a meal of her, sustaining himself by feeding on her. She provides the substance that triggers his overwhelming hunger. But what she understood at the time to be natural appetite she has now begun to intuit was really something else, something closer to craving, or at least some form of pre-craving, an overwhelming neediness that may tend toward substance abuse.

  There is a striking moment when the speaker directly addresses the reader again, as if making a confession. For the first time, the sentence and the line coincide, forming an intact unit: “I know what you’re thinking.” And what are we thinking? Only what the speaker has led us to think, which is that the mother has let the infant suck her dry. She projects the idea onto the reader, onto you and me, that she has let him take too much out of her. She feels marked or singled out as an addict’s mother and puts the reader in the position of judging her a failure, although, really, she is the one who is judging herself. She says, “I know what you’re thinking” precisely because she knows what she herself is thinking.

  That’s when the poem takes an argumentative turn, as in the conclusion to a sonnet, with another one-sentence line: “But he was her child.” The last two lines thus explain or rationalize the situation. As readers, we register the aggressive enjambment that divides this simple sentence into two equal parts: “She had to let him / Do that to her.” The guilt here is overwhelming. The speaker realizes that she has somehow enabled her son’s addiction, but she throws up her hands, as if in bewilderment: What else was she to do? He was her child. She couldn’t help herself. She had to sacrifice herself for him.

  It is strange and troubling that “The Addict’s Mother: Birth Story” reads addiction back into childbirth and breastfeeding. A mother and son become locked in a mutual, near-death struggle. The poet creates a poem from her own experience as a mother. But she has also split herself off from the situation in order to understand the bond that she has created with her son. She is overwhelmed by the way that she has unwittingly enabled his addiction. And she also wonders if either of them could have done anything else. Maybe they were doomed from the start.

  Afaa Michael Weaver

  * * *

  “Spirit Boxing”

  (2015)

  Spirit Boxing” is one of Afaa Michael Weaver’s most representative poems because it combines the brutality of his early experience working in a factory with his later spiritual interest in Chinese martial arts and healing. Weaver has spoken of working-class “interiority” as “a very solid tool of resistance against working-class oppression.” Here he brings that interiority together with something that he has gleaned from his long practice in the art of Taiji, or tai chi.

  Weaver spent fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore. He worked first at Bethlehem Steel and then at Procter & Gamble, scribbling lines of poetry during coffee breaks and writing after his shift. “In the warehouse, it was thousands of boxes circling around—every day the same thing,” he recalls. “You felt like you were being pounded into anonymity. Holding on to the poetry was a way of keeping myself alive.”

  Here is the testimonial that he wrote forty years after starting work in the warehouse:

  Spirit Boxing

  It is the tightness in the gut when the load

  is heavy enough to knock me over backwards,

  turn me back on my heel until my ankle cracks

  * * *

  and I holler out Jesus, this Jesus of Joe Gans

  setting up for the next punch while taking in

  one that just made his soul wobble, the grunt

  * * *

  I make when the shift is young, my body

  a heavy meat on bones, conveyors not wired

  for compassion, trucks on deadlines, uncaring

  * * *

  pressure of a nation waiting to be washed, made

  clean, me looking into the eye of something like

  death, and I look up, throwing fifty-pound boxes,

  * * *

  Jesus now John Henry pounding visions of what

  work is, the wish for black life to crumble, snap

  under all it is given, these three souls of spirit,

  * * *

  hands like hammers, a hammer like the word

  made holy, word echoing a scripture from inside

  the wise mind that knows men cannot be makers,

  * * *

  that in making we want to break each other,

  ache moving us to refuse to surrender in time

  in factories, catacombs feeding on the spirit.

  “Spirit Boxing” has a vigorous kinetic energy. It drives you forward as it winds one long sentence across seven three-line stanzas. It doesn’t take time to linger over any one of its myriad references. The movement enacts the experience, which takes place in the present tense: “It is the tightness in the gut when the load / is heavy enough . . .” This all seems to be happening now. But the poet who is writing this is catapulting himself back into the past. The combination gives Weaver a canny perspective, the ability to re-create an experience in the present while summoning up a range of references. He is working on the floor in a factory, but he is also placing that experience in a larger perspective.

  “Spirit Boxing” is a poem of great velocity, but we need to slow it down to talk about how it works. It’s as if the speaker has just entered the ring. The workload is a fighter who immediately knocks him back on his heels. The boxes are so heavy that they’ve got him staggering on the ropes. He has been hit so hard that he cries out “Jesus,” which sets off a trail of associations. Weaver seems especially alert to his own phrasing and often builds on it. The exclamation leads him to “Jesus of Joe Gans / setting up for the next punch while taking in / one that just made his soul wobble.”

  By making up a new name, “Jesus of Joe Gans,” Weaver references one of the greatest American boxers, the Black fighter Joe Gans, who came from Weaver’s side of town, the East End of Baltimore. Gans won the world lightweight title in 1902 and thus became the first African American to win a world championship in any sport. He was dubbed “The Old Master” and known for his slick technique, his ability to knock out an opponent with either hand. Yet the fights were sometimes rigged against him. He also lost an eye and kept on fighting. H. L. Mencken called him “the most gentlemanly pugilist on earth,” and Weaver goes one step further by linking him to the Christian savior, though in a sort of curse. This is a savior who must take one soul-wobbling punch while setting up another. Like the fighter, the speaker grunts, and
the poem quickly continues.

  “Spirit Boxing” captures the hard physicality of factory work, but it also manages to build a subtle critique of capitalism, and its dehumanizing force, through a series of rapid associations.

  my body

  a heavy meat on bones, conveyors not wired

  for compassion, trucks on deadlines, uncaring

  * * *

  pressure of a nation waiting to be washed, made

  clean, me looking into the eye of something like

  death, and I look up, throwing fifty-pound boxes, . . .

  The worker is reduced to animal status, his body “a heavy meat on bones,” though the conveyor belts don’t care; they move relentlessly forward, like the trucks pulling out of the warehouse to make their deadlines, to fulfill the needs of consumers, the “uncaring / [pause for the line break] pressure of a nation waiting to be washed, made / [pause for the line break] clean.” Notice the consonance of the letter c that threads “conveyors” to “compassion” and then “compassion” to “uncaring” and “clean.” The speaker is working in a factory that produces soaps and detergents. At P & G, Weaver often stacked boxes of soap by hand. He recalls how they came like soldiers around the curves on conveyor belts. The heaviest were boxes of one hundred giant bars of Ivory hand soap. Weaver uses the boxes of soap as a metaphor for what the country wants, something that will cleanse it of its sins. In the meantime, the worker is practically killing himself with hard labor, looking straight into the eye not of a person but of something that feels very much like death, looking back up to “throw” fifty-pound boxes onto skids or trucks.

  This action makes the speaker think of an African American folk hero—“Jesus now John Henry”—the legendary “steel-driving man” who boasted that no machine could ever break him down:

  Before I let that steel drill beat me down

  I’ll die with this hammer in my hand

  I’ll die with this hammer in my hand

  John Henry famously won a race against a steam-powered rock-drilling machine to cut through a mountain, but he died with a hammer in his hand. The hammer is the object of transference here; the experience of being hammered connects boxing, John Henry, and the Christian savior.

  The poem takes another associative punch when it asserts that “Jesus now John Henry pounding visions of what / work is . . .” There is a nod to Philip Levine in the phrase “what work is,” the title poem of Levine’s 1992 collection. Weaver’s phrasing is a way of tipping his hat to one of his few older contemporaries who placed work and working people at the center of his poetry. Weaver uses a line break to divide Levine’s phrase into “what / work is” and thus emphasizes the “whatness,” or materiality, of manual labor.

  Joe Gans and John Henry were both heroes of African American life. Race is relevant here, and the poem moves on to a series of associations about a system that wants “black life to crumble, snap / under all it is given . . .” But the Black poet refuses to buckle and instead sweeps up three figures connected by hammers and hammering, all more than just fighters, “these three souls of spirit.”

  The notion of “spirit boxing” is coming into focus. These three souls of spirit are also fighting for the spirit with their “hands like hammers, a hammer like the word / made holy, word echoing a scripture from inside / the wise mind that knows men cannot be makers . . .” The hammer is compared to the word (or the Word), which is sacred, which in turn echoes a spirit from “inside the wise mind . . .” That wise mind seems to refer to God, “Creator of heaven and earth.” Weaver seems to be arguing that human beings cannot be God or gods, who create life, because we have destructive impulses that lead us to destroy one another (“that in making we want to break each other . . .”).

  Particular sounds start to pile up at the conclusion of this poem. Listen to how three words are tied together by the m sounds in the line “the wise mind that knows men cannot be makers.” So too these sounds echo as rhyme emerges in the words “makers,” “making,” “break,” and “ache.” It is almost as if the sounds of the words are driving the thought, the spirit of resistance, the rising against oppression: “ache moving us to refuse to surrender in time / in factories, catacombs feeding on the spirit.” Factory work is spirit killing—as if factories have been specifically designed to crush Black life—and working in a factory is a form of spirit boxing. But the three great spirits invoked in the poem—Jesus, Joe Gans, and John Henry—refuse to surrender. They won’t crumple or give up.

  This leads us back to the title of the poem: “Spirit Boxing.” Weaver has literalized this martial arts term in a specific way by applying it to factory work. As a spiritual discipline, spirit boxing aims to utilize and also transcend the mechanics, techniques, and physical aspects of boxing. Its definition is “to look within and gather one’s true essence and inner strength, directing the will, thereby activating the power of the mind and harnessing the ‘Chi.’” That is called the Tao of Spirit Boxing.

  Afaa Michael Weaver has found his own Tao, his own path or way, in this hard-won and exacting poem.

  Victoria Chang

  * * *

  “Obit [The Blue Dress]”

  (2016)

  After a long illness, Victoria Chang’s mother died on August 6, 2015, of pulmonary fibrosis. Her mother’s death made the poet feel as if almost everything around her had also died. She was surprised by grief and wrote an entire series of obituary poems over a two-week period of somewhat crazed mourning; she then revised them over the next year.

  Each of Chang’s grief-stricken poems for her mother is spaced on the page in a way that makes it look objective and impersonal, like a newspaper obituary. The visual display is reminiscent of Renaissance figure poems, in which words are arranged to form a perceivable design that mimics the subject. Chang’s poems create a tension between highly subjective content, which includes a series of quirky questions, and the coldness of print, which imparts its own kind of finality. But these are anything but official obituaries. “Obit,” after all, is an informal word for “obituary.”

  Obit [The Blue Dress]

  The Blue Dress—died on August 6, 2015, along with the little blue flowers, all silent. Once the petals looked up. Now small pieces of dust. I wonder whether they burned the dress or just the body? I wonder who lifted her up into the fire? I wonder if her hair brushed his cheek before it grew into a bonfire? I wonder what sound the body made as it burned? They dyed her hair for the funeral, too black. She looked like a comic character. I waited for the next comic panel, to see the speech bubble and what she might say. But her words never came and we were left with the stillness of blown glass. The irreversibility of rain. And millions of little blue flowers. Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is wearing a dead person’s dress forever.

  One of the moving things about this poem is the way it metonymically displaces the obituary for the poet’s mother into an obituary for the mother’s outfit (The Blue Dress). We learn about the mother by reading about her dress. In this way, it is a sideways or angular elegy. It reminds me of the prose poem “Night Singer” by the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, which begins, “She who died of her blue dress is singing . . . Inside her song there is a blue dress.”

  “Obit” drills down on a set of questions about what happens to the pretty dress with small blue flowers, which the family has picked for the mother to wear in her coffin. The flowers themselves seem to flame into life momentarily (“Once the petals looked up”) but then are snuffed out (“Now small pieces of dust”). Since the mother can no longer choose an appropriate outfit—how she dressed had obviously mattered to her—the family chooses one that reminds them of her. They want her to look pretty. This is one of the many small countless rituals involved in preparing for a funeral. In one sense, selecting the right dress is not exactly a pressing concern—after all, the mother is dead and the dress is simply something to be worn in the coffin—but it also mimics the way certain details loom
large after a death. Sometimes in the shock of grief, the mind fixes on odd, seemingly irrelevant items. For example, as the speaker broods about her mother’s cremation, she comes up with a strange question: “I wonder whether they burned the dress or just the body?”

  The speaker can’t help but comment on the way that her mother’s hair has been dyed. It’s too black, much blacker than she had worn it, which makes her look comical. This kind of disconcerting observation, which many of us have made while looking into the coffin of a loved one, never appears in a newspaper obituary. The speaker appreciates her own wit—“I waited for the next comic panel, to see the speech bubble and what she might say.” But then she is brought back to the stark reality of the situation—“But her words never came and we were left with the stillness of blown glass.” Since blown glass is shaped by forcing air into a ball of molten glass, there is something eerie and appropriate in linking it to the mother’s absence of breath, the silence or stillness after death. From this silence, the speaker makes an associative leap to “The irreversibility of rain.” Like death, rain is a natural phenomenon that humans cannot intervene in. Indeed, the blue flowers on the dress now somehow morph into millions of little blue flowers, the beauty and impersonality of nature.