New England Review

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Writer’s Notebook—Surrender Your Biometrics Here

[Natalie Scenters-Zapico, photo by John Markadakis]

Before the pandemic, I made one of many trips from LAX to MEX with my husband. I have family in Long Beach, so it’s easy to catch a flight to Mexico City after visiting them. On my way home from one of these trips, I was struck by how fierce border protection through airline travel had become.

As many of us have experienced, agents blare over loudspeakers not to use our phones, they corral us into tinier and tinier buses, then to large cordoned off rooms filled with machines to process our documents and take our photos, until finally we wait for a receipt of judgement that tells us if we can go through the glass gates or if we must stop and speak with an agent. I am always anxious during these encounters, but usually because I am traveling with someone who is seen as “suspicious” by the state. My whole life my loved ones have been seen as a threat to the state in some capacity, and I have always been placed in the room just outside to wait and see if Homeland Security will leave me stranded in this country without anyone I love in it. It’s a peculiar and common position many are put in. On the one hand, it is a position of the privileged to have citizenship, on the other hand it puts one a stone’s throw from having everything that gives your life meaning in a country (mothers, fathers, siblings, partners) taken from you. 

My husband started the paperwork to become a citizen the week Trump was elected to office. I wish I could say it was because he wanted this, but the truth is more like I was terrified of losing him. When he finally went to a courthouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, to swear allegiance to the country that actively wanted him deported for over a decade, let’s just say it was emotional. Courthouse employees handed out tiny American flags to each new citizen. His class of applicants, if you will, was the first to be welcomed to the country by a DVD of Donald J. Trump. I wish I could tell you I remember what Trump said in that video, but I do not. I only remember being terrified that something could go wrong at any moment. When you grow up dictated by agents from Homeland Security and CBP you know all too well that what they say is “routine” can quickly turn into a routine to destroy your life. As my husband raised his right hand to say the oath, he looked so far away. The whole process felt terribly painful to me. But what was my pain compared to his? After the ceremony we both left the courthouse directly to teach at the university a few blocks away. No time off for a US citizen. 

Perhaps this is why on a return flight from MEX to LAX I was in shock when I was told that I had to go speak with an agent, and my husband would be the one waiting for me on the other side of the immigration barrier. It was a complete reversal of roles. Though I am a citizen of this country from birth, I was nervous. What could they possibly want from me? As my poem “Present this receipt to CBP” details, it was to present me with a sales-pitch for Global Entry, in which I surrender my biometric information so that I can further use the privilege of my citizenship to stand apart from my family. When I see people speed by me at the airport because they have biometric visas like Global Entry or CLEAR, I can’t help but see the cosmopolitan elite using its giant shoe to step on those who don’t have such privileges. In that moment though, nodding and smiling through the agent’s pitch, I realized that I was being asked to make a choice: Be a part of the cosmopolitan elite or stand harassed like the rest of the crowd. 

I have yet to apply for Global Entry. Truthfully, I refuse to do so. I’ll wait in line with the masses. I’m no foreigner to waiting in lines having grown up crossing the US-Mexico border from El Paso to Juárez and back frequently. We are in an era that asks us to document and surrender every part of ourselves. Perhaps a small act of radical rebellion can be to say: No. 

Natalie Scenters-Zapico‘s poems “Present This Receipt to CBP” and “Agent” appeared in NER 42.3. She is the author of Lima: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). Scenters-Zapico has won Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a CantoMundo fellowship. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of South Florida.

Matt Donovan

Writer’s Notebook—Poetry Where Nonfiction Fails

Photo of Matt Donovan

Not long ago, I flew to Chicago with a list of phone numbers, an interview itinerary with several social workers, ER doctors, and victims of gun violence, and a book project that was already unraveling, although I didn’t know that yet.

[Matt Donovan, photo by Brandan Sodor]

More than a year into writing a journalistic exploration of guns in America, I had an agent, deadlines, punchy chapter subtitles, and a two-sentence handwritten mantra pinned above my desk: Figure it out. Get to work.

Given the structure and premise of my planned book, “getting to work” often meant jetting off to different locations to ask a single pre-determined question about guns. A few weeks prior to arriving in Chicago, I’d traveled to Cody, Wyoming, to speak with teachers, parents, and the town’s sheriff about a new proposal to arm public school staff. Soon, I’d be spending the entire day with a ballistic detective in Cleveland. And my misguided agenda for Chicago? To ask about a trauma surgeon’s claim that we could change public opinion about guns by barraging the public, in the wake of a mass shooting, with graphic photographs that capture the way a bullet ravages the human body.

Given all the inherent problems with that question, I’m humbled by the patience, kindness, and generosity of the Chicago residents with whom I spoke. I’m particularly indebted to two people who ultimately revealed to me the myopic nature of my approach.

The day after I arrived in the city, artist Garland Martin Taylor offered me an extended tour of his studio. I tried to capture just one of his beautiful, multifaceted, ever-changing sculptures in “Here the Thing with Feathers Isn’t Hope,” and the ways in which Taylor’s artwork uses metaphor to interrogate firearms helped me understand that I needed to rework my planned nonfiction book into a collection of poems.

And then I met Pamela Bosley, co-founder of Purpose Over Pain, an organization that fights for gun law reform and offers support to parents who have lost their children to gun violence. In a conference room in Saint Sabina, a church on the city’s South Side, Bosley began our conversation by matter-of-factly describing the murder of her son. Her response to the tone-deaf question that I eventually asked is incorporated verbatim into my poem, “The Wrong Question More Than Once,” which I hope reflects my failure in that moment to understand the most fundamental truths about race and empathy in America.

After our discussion, Bosley led me outside to the sprawling memorial wall which commemorates hundreds of neighborhood residents. She pointed to a photo of her son—grinning in a white tuxedo and holding a cane—that was captioned “A Night of Elegance, Prom 2005.” I stood there on the sidewalk, looking at a picture of Terrell Bosley—whose nickname had been Mr. Music, who had been killed at the age of eighteen while unloading a drum set in the parking lot of a church—having just asked, a few minutes earlier, about whether photographs of the dead could enact grief and change.

Matt Donovan is the author of two collections of poetry—Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017) and Vellum (Mariner 2007), as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). A new collection of poems—The Dug-Up Gun Museum—will be published by BOA Editions in 2022. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. 

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley photo by Anne Skidmore
Sarah Audsley, photo by Anne Skidmore

Do poets always feel envious of painters? Do painters ever envy poets? “Field Dress Portal” (NER 41.4) was not begun out of envy but out of admiration for the painting Field Dress by Lauren Woods. However, I would be lying if I did not admit to often being envious of my friends who are painters. With layers of color from an invented palette, the artist’s perception of the world is realized; sometimes, it seems like an easier task than the poet’s. I am making assumptions. Of course, I do not believe that either the painter or the poet ever endeavors because it is an easy task. Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

The ekphrastic poem has always eluded me. In graduate school, I failed to respond to a writing prompt by one of my favorite mentors. I never really tried again until this poem because, I think, the ekphrastic poem intimidates me. At its heart, I understand that ekphrasis—defined by The Oxford Classical Dictionary as “the rhetorical description of a work of art”—is supposed to describe and respond to a work of art beginning with the poet’s description. But how does one adhere to the mode’s expectations and, possibly, transcend the pitfall of mere description?

My response to Woods’s painting evolved over time, almost along with the artist’s reworking of her canvas. I watched the pictures of her progress on social media, the painting morphing over the course of several months. Revisions of the poem did not exactly follow the changes the painter made, but I reworked many drafts from August 2019 to the final proof for NER.

I wanted to step into the painting—to feel the tree limbs underfoot, to imagine inhabiting the lighted landscape the painter created, to understand the forest in a new way. A painting is 2-D, but how can words make it 3-D? I hope this poem enlivens the painting, creates a portal for the reader, encourages looking up the original artwork, and for the question the poem asks to be worthy of the leap. Also, I am aware that I cannot use the phrase “dead doe” without evoking “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, which, in my opinion, is inimitable—I bow down before her and her genius. Perhaps Woods’s painting reminded me of Kelly’s poem. And, in that regard, Noah Stezer’s poem “For All the Deer” in Sixth Finch provides another lens to ruminate on deer poems.

Most importantly, though, I consider myself a “rural poet.” What I mean by that self-designation is that I claim belonging in the rural landscape—Vermont, specifically—as a Korean American adoptee. Seeing someone like myself represented in a rural or wild landscape was not common when I was growing up. I claim the pastoral. The poem’s speaker’s identity is not disclosed, but it is important for the “I” to take up the rural descriptions, to walk through the painting, to make my own portal of belonging with words.

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

A serendipitous moment in Scotland sparked NER poet Shara McCallum to answer, in her poems, the questions What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Where history ends is where literature and the imagination often begin. No Ruined Stone, the book from which the poems in this issue are drawn, emerges out of history’s omissions and silences. It uses the lyric and dramatic modes of poetry to reconstruct and reinhabit a speculative account of the past.

The book was in some sense born of a chance encounter. On my first visit to Scotland in 2015, having just come off the train in Edinburgh with my husband and our then young daughters and climbing a million stairs with bags in tow, we stopped at a candy shop off the Royal Mile before even reaching our hotel. The owner of Lickety Split was an artist and, as with so many Scots I would come to meet over the next five years of returning, open and easy with conversation. She also shared one of my children’s names, and we got to talking. On learning I was a poet and from Jamaica originally, Naomi announced, “You must know the story of Robert Burns and Jamaica, then?” I didn’t.

Late in the summer and into the fall of 1786, it turns out, Scotland’s great bard had actively made plans to migrate from Scotland to Jamaica. He’d contracted himself to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation on the island’s north coast—though “bookkeeper” in this context is linguistic misdirection. Were it not for his ultimate abandonment of his plan, Burns would’ve been responsible for daily overseeing and managing the work performed by enslaved Africans.

At the time I learned of this fork-in-the-road in Burns’ life, I was living with my family in London, feeling the layers of history beneath my feet and everywhere I turned. For months I carried this story around with me, like a sore in the mouth one’s tongue keeps finding. Walking the city that winter, a question entered my mind and took up residence: What would have happened had he gone?

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond. Doing so, led me to archives and travels in Scotland and Jamaica, into the pages of biography, literary and cultural history, and back to Burns’s poems, prose, and songs. It returned me with full force to some of my earliest and ongoing obsessions and vexations, including with Romanticism and the Enlightenment’s ideals and occlusions.

What resulted is a book-length sequence voiced primarily by two figures: Burns, transplanted to Jamaica for the last ten years of his life, and his granddaughter Isabella, a black woman born into slavery at the start of the nineteenth century, who migrates to Scotland and passes for white. The book dwells not only in the question that prompted it but in the many that persist for me as a writer. What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Shara McCallum, originally from Jamaica, is the author of six books published in the US and UK. The poems in this issue are from her forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns’s migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman (Alice James, 2017), was winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program. 

Categories