Laynie Browne and Lee Ann Brown on bodies at Small Press Traffic.

KSP Guest Blogger: Mg Roberts

Art by Nascha Poole

I parallel park in less than two turns, somewhere my grandmother is smiling with lipstick smears at the edges of her mouth.  It’s 7:49PM. Dinner. Juliana.  Late.  And I am early enough to find a seat on the couch across from a wooden vessel encased in glass.  Take NOTE [of the] SLIGHT CHANGE IN VENUE.  My pen dies.  We explore the Brown(e)’s aura via an intro by CA Conrad.

Lee Ann Brown begins the reading; her southern lilt fills the Macky Room.  She introduces a surrealist game, splitting the room in two. I am a series of interrogations, while the other half is the reply. Returning to the topic: On Bodies, Brown reads from her latest work—sonnets embodying the physical bodies of children, elementary education, and play—the interior and external appendages specific to children.  Her daughter reads quietly.   The reading nears its end with a ballad from Brown’s The Sleep That Changed Everything, but not before the audience gets to correspond and define exultation, daylight, a kiss, and I learn the answer to what an adjunct is: “duodenum—just say it”.

Yes, the replies to questions.  The correct reply.  A solution to the problem.  A correct solution.  Respond. Correspond.

Intermission is decided against and Laynie Browne continues the conversation: On Bodies by reading from The Desires of Letters, “She reads a mirror” and “lists prepositions as indistinct sound”.  Once again I return to the night’s theme: On Bodies, but this time as a landscape and its relation to children—to scaffolding.  I am most struck by Browne’s usage and description of the difficulty of space in the Bay Area typography, occurring as “lodged, fragmented, splintered without visible space,” which Browne correlates to the difficulty of raising children in such a landscape and the difficulty of community and avoiding utter self –righteousness, stemming from the physical attributes of living in a fractured space that demands we are “bodies enmeshed as coastlines,” subject to the ebb and flow of tides, broken I-bars, retrofitting, erosion.

Even several days after the reading I am still in conversation with the Brown(e)’s navigation of motherhood and its relation to the physical space of the body as architecture and geographic landscape.  As I re-enter into my own household as wife, mother, writer how do I navigate this physical space connected by bridges and tunnels, how am I “to embrace you without infinite affection” at the interstice of this location? Where everyday, as my daughter likes to say, is earthquake weather.

MG Roberts was born in Subic Bay, Philippines. She is an MFA graduate of New College of California, where strange tricks were added to her bag. Currently, she teaches in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in How2, Wordriot, horse less review, and13:after. If she weren’t a poet she would be a snake handler, or maybe just a good speller.