A Poetic Exploration of Modern American Life
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University of Tennessee at Chattanooga UTC Scholar Student Research, Creative Works, and Honors Theses Publications 5-2021 Young adult: a poetic exploration of modern American life Ellie Bixler University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.utc.edu/honors-theses Part of the Poetry Commons Recommended Citation Bixler, Ellie, "Young adult: a poetic exploration of modern American life" (2021). Honors Theses. This Theses is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research, Creative Works, and Publications at UTC Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of UTC Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bixler 1 Young Adult: A Poetic Exploration of Modern American Life Ellie Tripp Bixler Departmental Honors Thesis The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Humanities Department Examination Date: April 8, 2021 Richard Jackson Dennis Plaisted Professor of English Associate Professor Thesis Director Department Examiner Bixler 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS The Collection………………………………………………………………………………..3 – 22 Drone Strike……………………………………………………………………………….3 Edisto Beach In January…………………………………………………………………...4 Yesterday’s Newspaper…………………………………………………………………...5 Elegy for My Brother……………………………………………………………….…......6 Reincarnation…………………………………………………………………...................7 A Survival Guide………………………………………………………………….............8 Cable Television………………………………………………………………….……….9 A Political Climate………………………………………………………………….........10 How To Grieve ………………………………………………………………….............11 What I Know About Blackjack…………………………………………………………..12 It Never Happens This Way……………………………………………………………...13 TV Dinner…………………………………………………………………......................14 The Confederacy…………………………………………………………………............15 Repentance Prayer …………………………………………………………………........16 Road-Trip Buddha ……………………………………………………………………....17 Elephant Ears………………………………………………………………….................18 The Golden Days…………………………………………………………………...........29 Snapshots of America……………………………………………………………………20 Morning Glory …………………………………………………………………..............21 Translation …………………………………………………………………....................22 El Mojado (The Wetback) ………………………………………………………………23 Craft Essay………………………………………………………………….................................24 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...............................39 Bixler 3 Drone Strike The earth screams. A calf has escaped the pasture. She presses her soft nose to the tufts of dandelion that grow by the road and bleats for her mother. The night, cloudless once again, the air stretched thin as rotted elastic. In the orchard, the almond trees shudder as the brush-fire grows and their leaves begin to smolder. The calf feels the flame and knows that the warmth is her mother’s. She watches, moon-eyed, as the stars whistle towards the earth and the barn where yesterday she was born is shredded by light, by screams. Bixler 4 Edisto Beach in January The sea-salt wind stung my eyes as I crouched over the small hole in the sand and stared as tiny bubbles of air floated up and into the surf. You kneeled next to me and asked what I was looking for, and I told you I watched a sea louse crawl into that hole a few minutes earlier, and I wanted to make sure he came back out. You stood and tucked your hand into mine, and said that things aren’t always promised to happen, and besides, the sun was setting, the ocean wind was cold, and on our walk home I noticed how proud the palm trees stood, how freely the sea grass danced, how carelessly they let the golden light drip down their fronds. You stooped, ran your fingers through the sand, and found a shark’s tooth. You held it to the light and explained that it was there because there’s a port nearby, and they were dredging the sand to deepen the water for ships, and sometimes the best things -- like sharks’ teeth and sea lice-- are good at waiting for the right time to be found. Bixler 5 Yesterday’s Newspaper Do not despair, old friend. Read, Bomb Dropped in Da Nang. Read, Man-Seeking-Conversation in Brooklyn. Feel the rail worn gold beneath your palm. Breathe deep the smell of figs, of tobacco, still in your coat. Yesterday she sat here nursing a hand-rolled cigarette, wrapped in smoke and ostrich feathers, newsprint draped across her lap. This crossword’s too easy, she said. Let’s see Coltrane next week, she said. Yesterday you laid catty-cornered on your couch, her hair white and stuck to your lips. It was then, tucked in your arms that, to you, she felt small, fragile, for the first time. A spitting image of her mother, you say. Don’t forget to water the flowers, she said. Today you are here, with the figs and tobacco with the lily-of-the-valley in bloom with her hair still stuck to your lip, with her stockings left wilted on the floor. It comes easy now to hate the perennial, to despise the rising moon. The paper is torn in your hands. The headlines look small on the page. Bixler 6 Elegy for My Brother It was my brother who showed me how when you hold the tips of two burning matches together the flame triples in size, and we sat together on the warm playground asphalt and watched the matches burn down to our fingertips. I would shriek and drop the flame just before I could feel its heat, and crush the tiny embers into the blacktop. But my brother would sit quietly, hunched small over his matchstick, watching the flame move closer to his skin until the wood had all burned away, and only the fire remained, and for a moment he held it there, smoldering between his fingertips. Bixler 7 Reincarnation A woodpecker clings to my ribcage and drills holes in my sternum, tapping straight down into my spinal cord. I can almost feel the wisp of autumn wind in my lungs, the molten sunlight dripping through me, pooling in my mouth in the palms of my hands and around my feet. The bird taps again flutters her dark wings and for a moment I feel her heart beat. Bixler 8 A Survival Guide Sometimes, you just have to let ‘em be wrong, my mother always said to me. The butter knives don’t always have to go in the dishwasher blade down. It’s not always worth the fight. You make excuses as an act of love. We love them for the times that the blades face down. For the times that the dishwasher is loaded and washed and put away without you even knowing which way they were facing in the first place. It’s easy to love people when the knives are dulled by nights around the kitchen table, even when they are pointed straight up, even when you nick yourself reaching for a mug. Bixler 9 Cable Television A Time Magazine pop-up ad told me yesterday that they’ve compiled a list of the top YA novels of all time, and I wondered what the hell a YA was, and how someone could possibly claim to be both Young and an Adult, like some kind of Cronenberg, clawing their way out of the pimply alphabet soup of adolescence and into a three-piece suit and polished leather loafers. And I read in National Geographic that there’s a woman in India who, once a year, drinks goat’s blood and channels the goddess Kali, and when the drums are beating loud in her ears she is dances wildly on the threshold, both flesh and light, the movement and the sound, a gentle mother and the endless, raging river. And last night on NBC, I saw the face of someone who was shot twice in the back and fell into the purgatory between a boy and a man, who lived Young and died an Adult, and as his name scrolled across the news crawler and the words turned to the screams of his mother, we sat back and watched him writhe and crawl between a bloodstain and a beating heart. Bixler 10 A Political Climate There’s apparently a point in walking- somewhere halfway between that left and right, left and right step when we’re in freefall- burning through the atmosphere at a million miles per hour; colliding with the pavement leaving craters, big as swimming pools for our kids to splash and play and drown in, when we aren’t looking. Bixler 11 How To Grieve What is a void? Why does it sound sometimes like a telephone landline? How can electric wires carry your voice from out there? Is there enough light to see in outer space? How old is a photon? Where does the lamp light go at night when you close your eyes? Can a photon die? Do stars die of old age? How old is the oldest living organism? How can something be so old yet so small? Why do some things get to live longer than others? How can you tell the difference between something small and something insignificant? Bixler 12 What I Know About Blackjack An old man leans against the barn door. Under the sycamore tree with wet feet, Phaedrus explains with perfect enunciation that it is much better to be friends than lovers. He peels off his socks. The sycamore seeds rupture and the world is blanketed in blinding white. Sometimes there is a small wrinkle in the space-time continuum and a small boy from a farming town outgrows his boots and his shirt and sets out to find the edges of the earth, where the force of its spin feels like a neon tilt-a-whirl where a slip or a stumble sends him flying, hurtling through the milky vacuum of the night sky- past Andromeda and the baby bears- landing on a barstool in Casino Niagara counting rosary in one hand and spades in the other wondering if better not to be friends at all. He sips plum liquor and remembers his home. His garden grows over with dandelion weed. A barn door leans against an old man. Bixler 13 It Never Happens This Way You are born slowly, your soul crumpled, discarded.