Disendowing Danger

The poems of Metta Sáma's Swing at Your Own Risk insist that the power of language is not a mere abstraction, that a poem's subjects concentrate through political and lyrical relation. Its first poem "When the body's a graveyard" begins with a question that dilates and contracts over two pages "what if the body is not / sacred ground," through various subjects (fetus, child, man, child, father, history, mother), "does this stilled child still belong / to me? to / the ground? itself?", and undergirds the collection. The born or unborn child, literal or figurative, is biologically like the mother, and the mother like child; it's now known, irrefutably, that pregnancy changes maternal DNA.

The poems return to the child throughout, not as mere material or collateral, but as metaphor as well as fact. So too, is the invocation of a muzzled, martyred woman—St. Anastasia the Enslaved—in the book's third poem, which re-contextualizes once again that long before white and white passing celebrity women drew national attention to the heteropatriarchal power system through #MeToo, nonwhite women in particular have experienced and (will) continue to experience sexual exploitation at rates that far exceed those of women whose lives and careers afford them the platform to speak up and out, (according to recent congressional testimony in the stalled Savanna's Act, some 84% of Native women have experienced violence in our lives, more than half of us have been assaulted, more than a third of us have been raped—but so many crimes against women have gone, go, and presumably will continue to go undocumented that it feels at once futile and necessary to cite these figures) not just within exquisite poems as does Sáma. In "Escrava Anastacia speaks," the poems' syntax and movement between long, enjambed lines and contrapuntal one-word sentences—as in: "Ships crest and dock. Beneath this dress. Semen sea foams froths furors. / (Lace at the ankles. The means of me. To weather: shiver. Hinge. Wear. / Sluice. Flicker. Fuck. Flood.)"—remind the reader that utterance is not always in search of rhetorical applause, that dispossession of one's own body and experience catalogues itself in fragment and screen inasmuch as one is given to disclose it through social (or other readily-accessible and parse-able) media. The parenthetical, a recursion to "what" rather than "who" or "why"—these propel Sáma's poems, making visible the seams of edifice, pressing into language silence, silence against language, and then altogether as deliberately paced and cadenced. There is no accident of ink, of breath, of space.

The ostensive situations behind Sáma's book are powerfully foregrounded through the poems themselves at the level of the line and of sequence throughout. Any survivor eyeing Swing at Your Own Risk's table of contents might register each of the six section titles—Swing—as a denotation, a call to arms, an imperative, a description, a recollection, a noun. In poems like "NYPD v The people of NYC," which, like others in the collection, begins with "When," as in this poem: "When you see the pitch-perfect black 4-door / shaded windows." A reader's impulse to categorize lexically is checked by the lines that follow, "shaded windows roll up on you, don't grip / your wheel." Associatively, setting aside for now the second-person pronoun, consider not the rhetorical gesture of address, but the epigraph that recurs throughout the collection: Bhanu Kapil's "Sometimes you have to choose who you are." Keep in mind, too, that the windows are shaded, concealing identities, concealing that which happens within and filtering, as it were, that which happens without. "Casually look over your shoulder /as one of their windows slips down. Don't think / drive-by. Don't /remember history. It's only the police." Mindful, as ever, to parts of speech as well as to parts of self, the lines weigh themselves against the easy and/but heavy adverb prefacing the imperatives that follow, as well...