Poetry / Anne Barngrover
:: Ceres in the Red Tide ::
The ocean retches and collects. We have mistaken you, our water
god, for a savior of fallow pastures, your ruling
planet for a fixed star. A message blinks through the ether:
Let’s work on improving this together. But it’s too late
for prayers when salt animals distend heavy
as sodden paperbacks, toxic script penned on every folio.
They cannot hide in their septic shells,
and you cannot return the light
energy you harnessed from the sun. Don’t you remember? I tried to run
from you with hooves and quick reacting
tendons—I transformed myself into a mare.
Neptune, brother, you would not rest until you overpowered
everything that needed blue to breathe.
You plunged your own house into the Great Dark.
You sealed our throats with rocks. Haven’t you always
proved the impossible equation, never seen
with the naked eye, discovered only through ancient math?
I could not escape from you by horse
or will or sheath of grain. The ocean remembers.
The planets remember. My body remembers everything you’ve done.
:: Ceres in the Global Heat Wave ::
Have you ever tried to sleep
as winds thrash a lofted room
the way a god of evil flogs
a wooden ship at sea? You feel
very small. If it weren’t
for cliff gusts and morning
fog, we’d perish like snails
do on this dark and dry land.
They’ve been trying to live
since the era when islands
weren’t yet islands but a part
of seedlings’ collective dream,
white and spiral. I am not
from any country or generation.
This doesn’t take place anywhere
in particular, except for now
maps look like they’re screaming. Too hot
for ruins. Too hot for roads.
Fake popcorn flowers
on real cobs. Butter’s gloss undermines
the ruse, as if we required hyperbole
to prove what went wrong.
I’m rubbing the apocalypse
in your face, I guess, since I don’t get
to be moody otherwise. If men are mad
at me, they hurt me or they leave
with the blue stoneware
of my heart, and I never uncover it again.
Tonight, I’m the hottest I’ve ever been.
I figure if that star
doesn’t move by the next time
I look up at the sky, it must be real.
Art needs an artist, words need a writer,
and stars need to be believed,
but what can I say about faith
when I’ve given the last of my warnings?
I loved you in the marginal
seas and those not defined
by currents. I loved you with salt
on my lips and in small sounds
too numerous to list aloud.
I’ve been trying to live
since the era of your silence, which fills
with trapped air like a gasp
that goes on and on, and I’ll never
be emotionally detached for you
to take me seriously. I can’t save
every slug on ash and asphalt,
but I’ll touch their dank bodies
with hands not clean enough to hold.
Too hot tonight for rain. Too hot for eyes
to close. I lie awake all night
listening as you take the world
from me—little by little, then all at once.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems speak in the voice of the Roman goddess Ceres—whose Greek counterpart is Demeter, mother of the fateful Persephone—the ruler of agriculture, women and girls, fertility, and, randomly, cereal grains. I became compelled by the myths of Ceres because I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between the way that our planet is being treated and the way that vulnerable people, especially women, are being treated in tandem. This “Ceres series” imagines: What if this timeless goddess were plopped down in 2019, what would she be thinking? After all, in their stories, goddesses never escape the violence and pain of the world themselves. Ceres’s feelings of betrayal, rage, desperation, and grief, often caused by those she loves, as well as her insistence on truth-telling and resilience, are familiar navigations for me. Partially, this is because I live in Florida, a beautiful, otherworldly place rife with the horrors of poisonous algae, disappearing species and coastlines, increasingly unbearable heat, and some of the highest reports of cyber attacks and fraud in the country. I ask the unanswerable question in these poems: Can we save ourselves from the hell we have created, or have we already gone too far?
Anne Barngrover’s most recent book of poems, Brazen Creature, was published with University of Akron Press in 2018 and is a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Currently she is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the Low-Residency MA program in Creative Writing. She lives in Tampa, Florida, and you can find her online at annebarngrover.com.