Daniel Lawless, "I Tell You This Now"

 

Daniel Lawless is the author most recently of The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With; his current book, I Tell You This Now was released in March, 2024. Recent poems appear in FIELD, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, upsteet, SOLSTICE, Manhattan Review, Massachusetts Review, JAMA, and Dreaming Awake: New Prose Poetry from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., among others. A recipient of a continuing Shifting Foundation grant, he is the founder and editor of Plume:  A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, Plume Editions, and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies.

About I Tell You This Now, by Daniel Lawless
I Tell You This Now, although un-sectioned, and addressing any number of miscellania, concerns itself most prominently  with memories of his youth in Louisville, Kentucky, including sundry elegies, narrative and lyrical, composed in a variety of  styles - "definitions," as well as  prose, list, and ekphrastic poems.

You can read more about I Tell You This Now on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From I Tell You This Now

Family Photographs: My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965

In a year, Haldol, ECT, the closed gates of a sanitarium. 

But for now—how happy you were. To be eleven and unconcerned

For once with school, the Cubs, who punched who.

For a few minutes to be unlearned, to be taught

A new world. O, distant boy, how marvelous 

It all must have been, to be turned into a ghoul with your friends, 

To spurn the murmur of grown-ups with their highballs and hair

On the deck for a lowering sky burned sepia, orange. 

At three o’clock to feel yourself disappear inside yourself —

To cast no shadow. And – so long ago now 

how did you put it? —the delicious, insistent thought

What if it stays like this? To yearn and yet not to know yet 

What that yearning meant. 

Freudenschreck

Freudenschreck, or "intense pleasure-fright" – leave it to the Germans   

To coin a word for the fleeting sense of being seized

By such an inexplicable joy it verges on terror. 

Or maybe it’s inexplicable terror pretending to be joy. 

Also, a physical phenomenon: neurologists say the amygdala 

Glows red as a jack ball whether subjects gaze at images of planetesimals or gallows.

Picture a joyride, the Appalachian pin-brides of Eugene Meatyard. 

Put yourself in the shoes of Aiyana Clemmons, 44,

Of Peru, Indiana, a long-time congregant of the End Days 

Christian Church according to the Gazette, who may have had a seizure 

That caused her to "shiver all over" although another passerby reported

Hearing her shout "Praise Him!" or "Praise God!" before "she sort of rocked him" 

Before casting that beautiful child into that cold river.

Childhood

Though childhood is not what a child would know

To call it—her corpus callosum isn't quite

Connected yet—and anyway why would she want to?

When you're six you're a ghost inside another ghost,

Un-pierceable by anything in the substantial world,

Where this and this and this keeps happening.

A knob of milky quartz juts out of a rock.

There's a man on the moon, a box of matches adorned with a key.

You wear your life lightly

As the dog you name wears the name you name it.