I am so grateful to share that my poems “Philly Spring Cleanup” and “Tenant” are in the newest issue of the Philadelphia-based literary magazine, the tiny. Big thank you to the editors, Gina Myers and Ebs Sanders, for giving these pieces a home. You can read and share them here, and if you find the time, I encourage you to read the rest of the tiny issue 12.
Listen To: Philly Spring Cleanup and Tenant
I recently finished reading Marion Bell’s poetry collection, AUSTERITY (Radiator Press, 2019), which at times read like quickly jotted notes app memos written in the bathroom on company time. Which is to say, Bell’s work is exactly what I need when I need to take a break and don’t have the time to, when I need to feel understood, to experience a sense of solidarity as a worker among workers, a poet among poets.
In MOST OF THE TIME/REALISM, Bell notes: “you can make / a life / out of shitty jobs / that leave you weird kinds of time / you can make a life / that way / too.” Bell’s repetition of making a life reaffirms the value of selfhood despite the precarious employment many of us string together, working multiple gig-jobs through multiple economic crises. Individual and communal identity become both wrapped up in labor and also transcendent of it. For many of us, traditional career tracks were evaded, often unintentionally, in the struggle to survive and take care of one another. It is a life—and, we are free to want and demand more of our social conditions.
In a later, untitled poem, Bell is “trying to work for wages from home/ precarious, i guess/munching on snacks/ ‘remotely’.” While this collection was written before the pandemic, I am reminded of the weird kinds of time that working remotely since March 2020 has left us with, how boundaryless our personal lives and work lives can become. I wonder when I have ever “clocked out,” at what points I am ever “off work.”
Bell does not overlook the role of queer love in coping through these times—queer love is one of the central themes of AUSTERITY. Without an adequate structural safety net, chosen family becomes a safety net as we persist through sometimes intolerable conditions. Bell gets “radicalized by love / like any normal / American” just as we get radicalized “by austerity and by work.” Radicalization is a formative process, shaped by our own living conditions and in dialogue with each other, which undoes the narratives we are taught to believe about wealth, war, and nuclear family structures. Love is a part of this process, and Bell hits home when she writes, “the story of love / which stutters / & is material / that happens also / while looking for work / so you can keep living / to undo / what work does.” She goes on: “help me continue the story / that is interruption / love that is interruption.”
We find support and security in each other: “committed to what can only be approached by trust which is impossible to imagine after the things we’ve lived thru / still it’s the approach / it’s the only address / what keeps us addressable.” And when we have no way of knowing what is to come, struggling to find hope, Bell concludes that “the real future is the otherness we can’t imagine / and even I can’t defeat that in myself / it’s so resilient because it’s beyond me.”
The publisher of AUSTERITY, Radiator Press, is a Philadelphia-based press run by Ryan Eckes, whose own work is strongly rooted in labor and place. I would recommend AUSTERITY (and any of Radiator Press’ collections) to anyone who is feeling alienated or alone, who needs something human and collective to believe in.