Emily Skaja

Emily Skaja grew up next to a cemetery in northern Illinois. Her poems have been published by Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Journal, Mid-American Review, PANK, The Pinch, Pleiades, and Southern Indiana Review. She is the 2014 winner of The Russell Prize from Two Sylvias Press, an Academy of American Poets prize, and a 2015 AWP Intro Award. In April 2015, Emily finished her MFA at Purdue, where she worked as Poetry Co-Editor of Sycamore Review. In fall 2015, she will begin a PhD at the University of Cincinnati.
 
 
 
 

When you’re gone I press my hand to the stove just once. Patches of blisters pearl on my palm. I have sense enough to put on my coat. On the boat I am called Red. I take every other phrase from an elocution book. I wear a high collar that rubs against my cheek, & in the rain it leaves a scratch raised like a welt. I pretend not to know why you’re gone, pretend there is not the same sickness inside me. I try to explain about the curse for which the cure is not thinking. On the fourth day, notes on a disaster include water & water. A man on the boat follows me all day, just one question then I’ll leave you alone. There is nowhere a girl can go that a man like this won’t have a question. A trade he feels owed. There’s a hole in his glove & the skin underneath is peeled raw. A teakettle boils on the wind. Help me. On my knees I ask to be turned into a gull. I shift into white gloss, feathers.
 
 

I believe I am keeping the lights on by not forgetting they are there. I believe I can hold them in my mind & indefinitely sustain their brightness. At the Lutheran church in town, a lightbulb illuminating the cross has never burned out. People are always coming to our door to ask why the maple tree in our yard has turned white. Through March, the Christmas lights along the gutter stay on. My mother is awake all night crying. My father makes omelets. On the corner of Church & Main, twenty children are quarantined in a school. An old woman stands by the playground reciting equations into a megaphone. Pythagoras is still important after all this time. The cemetery can be measured—I count forty-seven seams in the sidewalk. In the garden, my mother digs up the hostas to keep them from taking over the yard. My father builds a birdhouse for purple martens. My mother calls to him, Isn’t it about time we took down those lights? The rain begins in earnest. At the end of a gravel road, I ride my bike into a pine tree. I can hardly see for the wet. I spit blood into my hands. A red tooth. My tongue is the shape of an egg.
 
 

Phillip: Thank you Emily for agreeing to do this interview for Vinyl. We are very excited to have these poems to share with our readers. They are beautiful and a little creepy, which is a perfect pairing.

Emily: Thank you, Phillip! It’s an honor to be interviewed. I love Vinyl. Beautiful and creepy is a great compliment.

P: I wanted to get started first by asking about form. We have three poems, two of which are prose poems and another which is in a staggerly indented form. The mythos and narrative drive in the prose poems are striking. We get instances of lyric throughout, of an internal struggle, but you never lose the momentum of plot, of an order of events that trigger other events. Can you speak a bit about the importance of the prose form to you and if you see yourself as creating multiple worlds or a single connected world? Do the prose pieces make a single place or do they each have their own contained moment?

E: What an insightful question. The prose elegies belong to a larger sequence of 10. I do think of them as belonging to one connected world, and to one narrator’s account of a loss that caused a significant rupture in her. I think of the speaker as someone who is constantly moving through a series of surreal landscapes. I wrote this series at a time when I felt stuck about the direction of my first manuscript. My MFA thesis advisor at Purdue, Don Platt, who is maybe the most generous person on this earth, called me up on a Saturday morning very excited about a new direction for the project. He said, “What about prose poems?” His idea was that, having engaged so directly with metamorphosis in the lyric poems in the book, that I would take on a classic discussion of Ovid in a prose poem series. I didn’t do that, but just saying “prose poems” freed me to do something very different than I had been doing. I wrote them with a sense of urgency that I had lost in writing poems in lines. I gave myself several obstacles in writing these– that they would each include water, for example, and that there would be a transformation in each one.

P: In “Elegy With Feathers” you write “There is nowhere a girl can go that a man like this won’t have a question. A trade he feels owed,” and “On my knees I ask to be turned into a gull.” I get an echo of Ovid in here but it has resonance in the contemporary, what with the talk of sexual assault becoming more and more present, and thank goodness for that. I did think Philomela but I also thought of a woman escaping street harassment. This same man on the boat though has hands that are peeled raw, which are in tune with the blisters on the speaker’s hands and the welt on the speaker’s cheek. So is there a part of the man that is also a part of the woman? Do you think that maybe transformations are multiple and simultaneous for us in our lives?

E: When I wrote the lines “There is nowhere a girl can go that a man like this won’t have a question. A trade he feels owed” I was definitely thinking of street harassment, and the kind of bartering a woman does in order to feel safe. If you give one male stranger who demands it your conversation, a smile, etc, you are accepting the premise that in being female you owe something to him. But if you reject him– don’t smile, don’t say hello, don’t say “Thank you,” then you risk making him angry, incurring whatever violence he may have in him. In those situations, it often seems safer or easier to take the course of action that will end the interaction the quickest, and sometimes that means saying “thank you” when a random stranger says something totally disgusting to you. I resent that and I reproach myself for it because it makes me feel complicit. So in that way, I think you’re right, they are alike. The speaker in this poem has made the decision to leave home and get away from what has happened to her. In leaving, she has introduced the possibility for new & unknown damage to come into her life. And it’s almost like, in deciding to leave, each new pain is confirmation for her that her other life is in the past.

P: So the idea isn’t so much an immediate transformation as it is transportation, a leaving behind.

E: Yes, and if that doesn’t work, if that doesn’t make you safe, then shift– then turn into a gull.

P: In “Elegy With Lamb’s Blood Over the Door” we get a string of events that seem unconnected but feel somehow intertwined, collaborating make make this very strange world full of children and this looming sense of danger. The children are quarantined in their school while Pythagoras is shouted into a megaphone. A mother cries nightly. Then the domestic takes over, “In the garden, my mother digs up the hostas to keep them from taking over the yard. My father builds a birdhouse for purple martens. My mother calls to him, Isn’t it about time we took down those lights?” as though to say, even the strange is normal and the normal is strange, a kind of plague. What is the driving force of this poem as it relates to the looming danger and the claustrophobia? How do you view, if you view, our domestic lives as being this endless Halloween?

E: I like that phrase, “endless Halloween.” Of all the prose poems in the series, this one probably contains the highest number of true references to my life. I grew up in a very small town full of ghost stories. There really is an old schoolhouse at Church & Main in my hometown where, supposedly, children who were once quarantined there with the Spanish flu now haunt the building, which has been turned into apartments. The house I lived in was bordered by cemeteries on two sides with an expanse of swamp woods behind it. Because the town was so small, when something awful happened to one person in the town (e.g., the loss of a child), the grief was public. When I was 11, my family and the town suffered several losses simultaneously, and I began to think differently about the cemeteries and the funerals I watched. It struck me that these harrowing, life-breaking events were normal and regulated in a way that felt hysterical to me. It had seemed to me until that point that if you were careful and lived your life in a way that was conscientious, you would not lose everything you cared about. The title refers to the Biblical idea that you can prevent suffering, that there are measures you can take. And the speaker in the poem is obsessed with measuring, looking for order. But she has to give up the idea that if she can hold everything safe in her mind, as she does in the first line, she will prevent things from falling apart.

P: But then “Indictment With Icarus,” completely crushes all of that:

“Didn’t I tell you & didn’t I tell you Emily

                                             not to fight for the gospel of error

not to row out as far as the river goes

                                             not to raise up your arms like a waxwing bird

like you’re free, like you’re everything

                                             falling?”

The bird in “Elegy With Feathers,” the water too, are all revealed as the illusions they always were. I get the sense that the speaker is actually the mind of “Emily”, Emily who chastises herself for having believed in there being a way out, of her capabilities of being her own savior. It was in this poem where he lyrical mode and the verse style gave light to how the surreal narratives in the previous prose poems were just masks of control. The form here breaks apart as more and more is revealed to be a farce of safety or at the very least a difficulty to remain safe. Can you talk a bit about what safety means to you? What are some things you learned about protection’s promises, broken and fulfilled, while writing this poem?

E: Phillip! This is high-end psychoanalysis. I should be paying you to ask me these questions. You should have a glass office with a view of a lake, a leather couch. This poem is indeed Emily confronting Emily for not anticipating her own problems. The poem asks, How dare you let us feel this same hurt twice? Ethically, as a human, what is wrong with you? One of the life lessons in grace is learning to tell yourself, “That old me, that me from last year, was somebody else. This year’s me is incredibly different, wiser, more capable and full of strength.” That’s a good way to move forward. But the problem with training to be a poet is that you learn to look for patterns in everything. So if you wield that skill against your own life, it’s easy to find your own destructive patterns– for example: putting yourself in an unsafe situation and having to rescue yourself over and over. Yes, you learn to overcome. But you already learned that once. Why keep learning it again and again? So the speaker in this poem is angry about that, and she holds herself accountable.

P: Before we wrap up, please tell us more about your manuscript. Title? Themes? Formal? Experimental? Things like that.

E: I’m working on finishing my first collection. The version of it that was my MFA thesis was titled Thank You When I’m an Axe. The poems are largely autobiographical, and they deal with grief, partner violence, transformation, departures, voicelessness, and the stories that women tell each other to make sense of their own histories. Most of the poems are not stand-alone pieces but belong to a series. The prose elegies make up one series, and there is a string of breakup poems that I think of as The March Series. Right now, I’m working on a series of poems written in a collective we voice that considers female archetypes and the struggle of fitting oneself into a girl origin story.

P: Fantastic! I am anxiously waiting for this book to become part of my library. Thank you so much for speaking with me this afternoon. Where can people go to learn more about you? I am sure after reading this interview there will be many new fans.

E: Oh, you are too kind! Thank you, Phillip. I can be found in various haunts around the internet. Here is my website: www.emilyskaja.net. Thank you again for interviewing me!