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    Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit
    Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit
    Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit
    Ebook90 pages38 minutes

    Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit

    By Susan Swartwout

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    About this ebook

    A Southerner by birth, Susan Swartwout's history and writing are steeped in the gothic elements of quotidian life in the Deep South, a celebration of difference and the uncommon—odd beauties who embellish our plain lives. These poems explore the lives of freaks—celebrities of Southern fairs' sideshows—such as conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker's married lives, the Fat Lady's work schedule, Tom Thumb’s Barnum-warped ego, all parallel to the hidden desires, plots, and jealousies of the rest of us. Our exterior normality belies the internal twisted landscapes—how complicity and silence echo abuse, how depression infects entire families, how a five-year-old learns to use words as weapons, how human need dispels language's boundaries. From circus oddities to real-life boogeymen, from Louisiana to a Central American village, earth has no dearth of the gothic's strange fruit, illuminating the complexity of what it is to be human.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Mantel Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2015
    ISBN9781941799062
    Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit
    Author

    Susan Swartwout

    Susan Swartwout is professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University where she serves as the publisher of the University Press and edits two literary journals, Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi River Valley and The Cape Rock: Poetry. She's the author of the poetry collections Freaks and Uncommon Ground, editor of Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, and co-editor of three books. She has published over 100 poems in literary journals and anthologies. Among her writing awards are the St. Louis Poetry Center's Stanley Hanks Award, New York's Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, the Davenport Award for Fiction, a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship, and Seattle's Hedgebrook Writers Fellowship.

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      Book preview

      Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit - Susan Swartwout

      Tenderest

      Southeastern Atlanta Fair, 1962

      When our eyes have opened to shadows in mote-thick air of the circus tent,

      when old men’s droning of what circus once was and mothers’ sibilant

      scolding to restless children has slowed to a barely perceptible pulse,

      the carney throws back the bedsheet curtain, strides to stage’s edge

      where he pauses, above us. In the growled breath of a crank caller, he twangs

      his whiskey-hard speil: what you are about to see . . . nothin’ ever like it

      on earth . . . tenderest part of the body . . . beyond human understandin’ . . . Electra.

      From behind the bedsheet shuffles a scrawny woman whose bones knuckle

      creped skin, her face the lined mask of a thousand farm wives: she reveals

      no opinion. The carney’s arms and yellowed grin refer to her widely: door

      number three: his prize in the faded two-piece swimsuit, Marilyn of canvas

      roadshows. She stands mute, like the woman in Anderson’s tale who feeds

      and feeds the world until she dies in moonlight, reborn a romantic

      instant in villagers’ eyes as a lovely girl—mistaken and taken for what

      she never was. We sit silent, praying for transformation to save her from us.

      The carney reveals a cattle prod and the timepiece that is our breathing halts.

      He waves the rod like a flag: it sings, whines to be fed—she is hypnotized.

      The tenderest part of the human body, says the carney. He slides the rod,

      horizontal, in front of her, not touching. Our nerves become her. Before her

      breasts, then level with pelvis, he pauses the rod the tenderest part and moves

      upward as if he would stroke her—for us—as if he would enter her on stage.

      Rod at her throat, her tongue takes its cue, appears automatically in a curve

      as if taking a bow the tenderest and he lays it down: rod onto flesh. The fake

      smoke of his hell and susurration of his pardon that keeps her tied to this place

      rise over her head like a benediction, resigning all faith in the tenderest part.

      Five Deceits of the Hand

      1.

      While your hair is still silk of young corn,

      your baby teeth tiny kernels, you learn to count,

      to take stock of things around you. Numbers

      come like promises, dreams for the tallying.

      You sign for them with your infant fingers,

      copied from the silver side of your parents’ looking

      glass: Put your fingers like this. That’s One, and the sky

      you point to is enclosed. This one you hold in

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