DADDY, I'M SORRY, I CANNOT WRITE AN ELEGY

DADDY, I’M SORRY, I CANNOT WRITE AN ELEGY Colby Meeks

Penumbra Press Series 3

This book is funded by the Instructionally Related Activities Grant of California State University, Stanislaus.

California State University, Stanislaus Penumbra Literary and Art Journal 1 University Cr. Turlock, CA 95382 Cover design by Brenda Nelms Edited by Catherine Azevedo, Schuyler Becker, Andrea Wagner, and Mary Worthington Copyright © 2024 by Colby Meeks Penumbra Press, 2024.

All Rights Reserved.

Penumbra Press is an extension of Penumbra and Penumbra Online.

For more information, see our website at www.penumbraonline.com.

The Penumbra Press Selection Process For the third year in a row, our team has been fortunate enough to receive a plethora of compelling, captivating, and carefully crafted works. Rather than coming to a quick and unanimous decision, we had many exciting contenders for publication. The viability and printability of these submissions cannot be understated. The selection process process is one of the most exciting aspects about Penumbra, and we are thankful to have had such amazing content made available to us. The poet we selected is a true star of their craft and their poems have earned the respect and admiration of our staff. We are delighted to present their work in the third edition of Penumbra Press.

In addition to being thorough in our selection, we at Penumbra Press also wanted to be sure to curate a beautiful cover that would convey the powerful images and emotions our chapbook author evokes. After considerable time and careful consideration, we selected Brenda Nelms, an art student at our university Stanislaus State, to create Meeks’ cover. We felt that the message of the author was only highlighted by the artist’s creation and hope to show a blend of both. We hope you agree as you read Colby Meeks’ DADDY, I’M SORRY, I CANNOT WRITE AN ELEGY.

for Daddy

Table of Contents

Revelation, in a Lake Bed

1

Sunday Morning in the Dining Hall

3

Drawing then Destroying Crop Circles

4

A Day’s Length

5

Autopsy of a Librarian

6

Genealogy of Lost Time

7

Approximating the Purposes of Astrophysics

8

Undiagnosing H5N1

9

Anatomical Corrections (Botanical)

10

Self-taught Sommelier

11

Wool

12

June

13

Tantamount to Pocket Change

14

Intrapersonal Interpretations of Noahic Covenant

15

Mimeographed, Piecewise

16

Terracotta

17

Pacifists Cocking Stolen Guns

18

Aubade for the Final Weeks in August

19

Revelation, in a lake bed The day the lake dried up, we didn’t even notice, at first – the old women still tossed their stale bread in for the fish, the old men still patrolled the shore for snakes and snapping turtles, and I still woke up to put on swim trunks and braid my hair.

My body anticipated the first full subwmersion of that day, skin drying up and burning from just below my hair follicles in hopes of tempering an ice bath it craves hard enough that I find myself standing over an empty edge.

And it is gone – suddenly, a hollow cradle of brittle dirt like a promise unkept, that leaves the youngest children pushing fat, unstretched fingers in search of earthworms into patches of earth between quick-drying fish carcasses.

They won’t remember when we dove headfirst here, in a year’s time they’ll just think of the roly polies and mushroom shooting stalks around decaying scales which stink of a premature decomposition into mud.

The rest of us, our throats thirst for water we drank only on accident, slicking down the stray forest fire aches in esophageal valleys, missing the motions of full-body submersion in the pit we missed evaporating.

One frail, old lady refuses to surrender her swims in the stubborn elderly ages and splays herself out in ground, shiny fabric of a pink tankini, shimmering like an oil slick, curving around the wrinkled skin of her bony thighs.

1

Her skin catching the stray rays of a soon-autumnal sun, her body sits still as a corpse, as though she is practicing the peace, silvered hair filling with clumps of dirt and the stench of things drained but never washed clean.

Someone laughs, that she’s finally lost her mind, but the rest of us know here, body in a premature but ripe grave, she knows the only way to remember the flutter of fish around our feet is to feel the soil they’ve fed.

2

Sunday Morning in the Dining Hall Sometimes the point of drinking coffee is just to see the sugar sink and creamer emulsify itself into a spiral held neatly in a mug. Not to jolt the body free of sleep, not to feel your fingers flicker warm, but to wonder why nothing curdles.

Sipping it through curled, chapped lips expecting the clots of dairy to burden your tongue, but they never come.

Every other part slips through pursed lips in perfect fidelity: a burnt tongue, the anticipatory guilt of stained teeth, dregs of thick, clabbered sugar sticky against enamel.

But never the sickly mouthfeel of curds.

And you forget, for weeks, months maybe, until a house party bartender can only make Irish car bombs and you nurse a hangover with Ibuprofen taken with the astonishment at unsoiled dairy after somehow forgetting it could do anything other than scramble into sunken beads.

3

Drawing then Destroying Crop Circles Dirt. Just dirt, nothing growing from the mound left untouched and so I suppose this means there is nothing dying here, either.

At least, I say that as I crumble the clotted earth piece by piece in my dry hand, making sure to watch for the clovers I am waiting to find.

Searching as though my palms are delicate enough to perform this archeology in pursuit of luck, and as though there is enough luck left to shoot roots through an unflinching ground.

It’s all clumps holding nothing except for miscarried pipe dreams in which every seed germinates and every sprout reaches out with heavy arms towards a blind sun.

For just a moment my mouth quivers from my lips to my molars when I find no leaves to count and my palms are burnt red.

4

A Day’s Length Every day the sun gets lost somewhere in a sky filled with too many clouds to track a clear path from east to west. I watch it hobble through blue clutter in the backyard begging it to run like it used to. In Back Bay I asked a friend if she noticed the way the sun was swirling the sky with no intention of dropping through the bottom of the vortex.

She just says, “No.”

5

Autopsy of a Librarian A book sat careful on a bowed bookshelf, aged wood giving way to rot. A dictionary, condensed because not every word is needed, with thin translucence tucked inside the pages (if opened, it’d span hulk to hurricane) and peaking out.

The wax paper was bought about twenty years ago and it cradles flowers from a lavender bush no one remembers wilting until some landscaper weed whacked it into nothing.

For the sake of honoring a tradition of forgetting everything about this purple bastard, the petals (should one call those beads on a lavender stalk petals?) are left to continue melting into paper to fizzle and fade to dust.

Someday the bookshelf will collapse or the dictionary will be thrown into a bag of unassumed trash and who then can tell us about hurricanes.

6

Genealogy of Lost Time Twice a day the clock above my desk tells perfect time, but I always seem to look just a moment too late to know.

Like walking into an empty terminal knowing you just missed a train, I glance at a golden-hour clock four minutes behind.

My fingers dance around the slender hands I could snap off, fighting off the need to push them forward into place, now.

I could do it, every minute, always watching as it turns perfect or I could buy batteries, a pack of hundreds, but I forget.

I forget that my room should shoot around a tick tick echo and I only remember when the hands are stuck behind me.

And the time won’t stay right, even with new batteries every day, in two months I’d have lost enough time to miss every sunset.

Every single sunset because the clock is never right, not once a day, and especially not the evenings when the day’s grown weary.

For months I’ve thought batteries with my hair up and pajamas on and I wake up knowing it’s never going to happen, not soon.

And when I settle into my chair with achy joints to write a letter to my mother, or someone I guess, it’s forty-nine minutes late.

7

Approximating the Purposes of Astrophysics When the clay bows beneath our feet, what is there to feel but the insecurity of cracking soles? How it feels as though we could sink the Earth – push it straight out of the Milky Way. And why couldn’t we? Just one of us, two maybe, plummeting a whole world with quick motions: a hop, a skip, or a step.

Maybe we’d miss it, or maybe it happens so fast we don’t notice we’re gone; the globe iced in a matter of moments, disparate.

I do not know how gravity works – would our bodies dislodge from concrete before it freezes?

Maybe we should just stand still, as though already ice.

8

Undiagnosing H5N1 The cardinals are sick again their hollow bones filling–quick!– with enough microscopic influenzas they stick to the ground.

I pity them and feel full of vindication that they are no better than me, here, on the porch with heavy bones sinking to the bellyside of all my skin.

Half of them will die in the front yard preparing itself to memorialize them and the other half will be pleasured by the bird brain’s failure of memory as they fly away from here forgetting their breaths growing stiff and fast and before they pass into Tennessee there will be nothing left called sick.

My bones will still be heavy, my hands still reaching into body to dig them up from the gutters of my arms without even any pity.

9

Anatomical Corrections (Botanical) I tell a friend I want to dig up the tree in my backyard, shedding bark and flowers reeking of sex. He says to me, but don’t you think it is beautiful? He means the blooms and the bark and the boyish pleasure of smelling semen in your backyard.

I tell him, it deserves to be taken down from its high place.

From its low place, too, roots ripped up and out in quick motions until myself and the dog and a dead rabbit are wrapped up in a haphazard vascular system.

When I try, later, with my grandmother’s shovel, nothing budges. Even the ground refuses to yield. My foot aches at every push on the shovel until I am left no choice but to mutter, Who cares, with no one to care but a rabbit, recently deceased.

10

Self-taught Sommelier Our wine’s gone rancid. All vinegar.

Soured and sick on our tongues, we have to ask how we managed to make sense of collecting corks.

Why didn’t we think to ask how long it lasts in an oxygenated kitchen?

But it’s rancid now. Too late to ask.

Too late to do anything but let our lips curl in and slip a sharp wince onto our faces.

Unfit for cleaning, unfit for anything what are we to do except sip it, slowly, until the taste is familiar and we stop showing the moment it touches our tongues.

I am sick to my stomach, and I still feel every drop sliding down my throat.

11

Wool In the closet, in Alabama, there’s a sweater blocked with color, faded, I bought in Massachusetts.

It smells. No matter how many times I wash it. Like an old man aged out of youth, years ago, leaving it for me, to inherit some future which has failed to unfold.

And the moths burn their holes into it, they are not the first to take pleasure here.

Frayed out spots I forgave with a worn five-dollar bill recollect a past life on the chest.

Sometimes I threaten to fog the whole room and listen as though I would hear them suffocate. I don’t mean a single harsh word I tell them, I know. And they know. And so they leave me with a few threads, at least.

12

June When the fish tank was a death trap I wished I’d known. That is, I wish I’d apologized to every fish I held in warm hands in a hot car until they slipped into the tank, held then by warm water in a hot room. None of them knew I felt bad watching them suffocate for hours and then leaving a corpse impressed in the gravel we picked just for them (and then for their predecessors).

And none of them knew how careful we handled them, slimy and threatening to turn our air noxious.

And how do we tell these new fishes of the week their home was a cemetery without upsetting them?

They feed on bloodworms and I want to tell them anything of their ancestors, but I just watch them suck the slippery insects from the sky and then play in the bubbles.

13

Tantamount to Pocket Change An elderly little woman at the flea market sits with a girl I guess must be her granddaughter.

The same eyes, the same nose, the same coils springing up and out from their scalps.

Their booth is cluttered with battered books and flower pots overflowing with pothos leaves.

Except, two neat pitchers and a platter of Dixie Cups with the little girl’s hands piddling between them.

I fumble through my pocket for a cache of coins to fill my palm to buy a pink lemonade from her.

The girl, beaming like a fiery sun, lets me know her lemonade is thirty cents, but pink is fifty.

Her grandmother laughs and speaks in a crackle, the pink is just the same sweetness as the regular.

She says this like I am eyeing snake oil vials held tightly in straps of a leather suitcase sat open.

I ponder for a moment at this fool’s medicine which will never make me feel anything but poorer.

Two quarters fall to the table and this little girl pours wobbly from a sweaty glass pitcher.

14

Intrapersonal Interpretations of Noahic Covenant It’s raining again and I want to ask, who gives a fuck? If the creek floods we’ll climb to the roof, crawling the bricks as though they were always sat there waiting to be ladders for a misplaced monsoon.

And if the water creeps up on us where our fingers are grazing birthing skies we’ll wait. Because the street runs downhill and when the moon rises it will drag everything back to oceans.

Slow, at first, I’m sure, and my mother will watch anxious with an arm around my sister unable to sleep even before catastrophe. With languid eyes, everyone watches waves creep away filled with roots and now saturated dry rot.

My car has a leaky sunroof sometimes so I will look past the sogging sheets on my bed and my waterlogged bookshelf and when the sun rises just for the sake of growing mildew I will say it smells like I am seventeen, buying gas.

And when I am finally forced to gut it: tear up hardwood and rip open walls reeking of must and the ink washed from photographs I will refuse to cry for fear of doing it all again, but I will search for months – years – for that old yellow paint.

15

Mimeographed, Piecewise I broke my mirror.

Shards All over my bedroom floor in anticipation of My stripping: the shirt, the pants, then socks.

It’s fine, I guess, I can buy a new mirror – gold framed and ornate.

And I can sweep the floor And then vacuum the floor And then run a piece of bread across the floor (My grandmother recommends this to me).

Some pieces too small to notice By bristles or siphons or crumbs outstretched searching, Will settle into the veins of the wood so comfortably It will hurt twice over when a bare foot Dislodges them.

Of course the blood will run For no more than a minute, clotting at the soft Seam of the sole of my left foot, but it will Bleed.

And I will whine for A while about the ache In every step and every tightening of a lace Until I don’t think to apologize To fragile skin or skimmed glass Except for the purple-red blister On the ball of my foot.

16

Terracotta Growing flowers in the kitchen never works because you have to move the pot when you cook because you have no counter space and you spill your salt every time you’re cooking with it which is every time you’re cooking and the soil is salted like Carthage.

Every Spring and every Summer the Earth dies over and over on linoleum.

It’s terribly sad, you’ll think, and you’ll try again until the stores pack up their seeds and you run out of salt and when the shelves restock them you’ll buy more for that damned pot.

17

Pacifists Cocking Stolen Guns Two dogs are lost On a highway in Montgomery Called brothers by their four-year-old Owner From different litters and Different mothers, just one Is massacred by a Ford With bad brakes Dead before its skin Gets dislodged from tire treads And his playmate howls Like a hot bottle rocket It would resign to die Too between asphalt and rubber If not for the girl with kinky Hair waiting to stroke his fur.

18

Aubade for the Final Weeks in August for Momma & Kayla & Crimson Let’s run over to the creek.

Watch it devour straight Sludge, like it is a delicacy Turning itself into a stew Of shopping carts and stray shoes.

We’ll make believe it Into a beach, at worst A lake. Let our legs sink Into overgrowth No one is responsible for And no one cares to comment on.

The sun will burn and none of us Really care for the swimming: Not the fish, not the groping vines, Not the mud dragging on our feet.

But if there’s a beach, We should swim.

If there’s a beach, Watch the waves.

A push and a pull Littered with residuals.

We could count them until We wake up with the oranges At our backs.

19

Author Biography

Colby Meeks is an Alabama poet who is currently pursuing his bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard University. He served as the 2023 Poetry Editor for The Harvard Advocate. His work can be found in numerous journals and publications, including Bending Genres, Lavender Bones, and Eunoia. He will always defend country music.

Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without many people who have, in ways they may or may not know, shaped both my poetry and my life, before and after it was defined by grief.

Of course, above anyone else, my mother, Swana Meeks, and my sisters, Kayla and Crimson Meeks. I would not have made it through December without you, let alone to the end of this manuscript.

While the list of friends who have helped in many, many ways – from reading individual lines of poems to listening to my grief-fueled rants – is far too long to list in full, some of the names which come to mind first are: BreAna Werner, Taylor Shumate, Logan Donahue, Keira Folsom, Chandler Paulk, Lise Dahl, Jaylen Cotton, Jessica Zhang, Una Roven, Eve Jones, Michal Goldstein, Juliet Coe, Annika Inampudi, Carson Oliver, Natalie Roberts, Jillian Naylor, and Skye Anderson. Some of you know exactly why you have made it into this list, and I’m sure some of you have no idea, but thank you, either way.

The staff of The Harvard Advocate, but most importantly the Poetry Board – you have kept me sane and made me feel like there was something worth putting effort into when I could muster care for nothing else.

And, to the various teachers and professors who have shepherded me as a writer and shown me the most human compassion and love I could have asked for, thank you. To Michelle Sisson and Stephanie Hyatt, especially, thank you beyond words.

Written in the wake of the death of the poet’s father, DADDY, I’M SORRY, I CANNOT WRITE AN ELEGY, is a chapbook which asks how we ever expected a single poem to hold all of grief. Re-examining the traditional elegiac form, these poems reimagine poems about grief as being both independent and interconnected, with each poem holding an entire, complete episode of grief while sitting beside other moments of grief in an interconnected ebb-and-flow of emotion. More than anything, though, DADDY, I’M SORRY, I CANNOT WRITE AN ELEGY, is a son’s attempt at understanding what it means to no longer have a father.