Home » Editors » Radius: Rachel McKibbens, Stevie Edwards, Emily O’Neill

The Editors Write: We’ve had the pleasure of a front-row seat to Stevie Edwards’ writing for pretty much the entirety of her publishing career – Radius’ predecessor, The November 3rd Club, being among the first journals to publish her. And it’s been a remarkable thing to watch, as this poet continues to put forth poem after poem that are razor-sharp, surprisingly delicate and packed to near-exploding with emotional content. Edwards is fearless in the face of language, and doesn’t flinch as she brings the straightrazor of her poems right up to the reader’s neck. But what’s perhaps most startling about Edwards is the sense that she’s really just getting started, and that there are still miles and poems ahead of her. Frankly, we’re always excited to see what she does next.

Revisionist History

By Stevie Edwards

I need a new story. I want a daughter:



Let it be said that the girl in the prey pose

knew so much of her beauty

she roared the baseball player’s ears deaf

before biting the right one off Mike Tyson style.



Let it be said that upon losing music

the man wept himself into

a drowned boy—

and the girl, seeing his ache

was its own ocean, dredged

his limp behind back to shore.



Let it be said that when the man rose

unchanged by mercy,

the girl’s incisors were filed sharp as shanks

as her mother had told her best suited ladies

in the wilds of home team nights.



Let it be said that her mother

was a butcher. That she knew how

to gut a mammal without waste.



That she never looked back.

***

Love Letter to Rachel McKibbens, from Stevie Edwards: Rachel, I asked if we could feature “Letter from My Heart to My Brain” and “Letter from My Brain to My Heart” because you performed these pieces the first time I saw you, which was at Columbia College — Chicago in Spring 2010. I remember weeping quietly in the audience, your litany of “It’s okays” giving me permission to be — to be a woman who struggles with mental illness but is not solely defined by it, to love myself both despite and because of it, to write truths even when they’re ugly, to find beauty in wounds. Above all, Rachel, your poems have taught me relentless self-acceptance and bravery. In 2011, when I emailed asking you to be a reader for my first book, Good Grief, I thought, no way is this phenomenal poet going to be willing to look at my measly manuscript. But you said yes. In fact, throughout the past four years of my getting to know you better as poet, friend, and mentor, you’ve given me dozens of yeses, of chances, that I expected to be shut doors. What I admire most about you as a poet is how your poems give so many women writers permission to be fierce and fucked up and unshakably beautiful. What I admire most about you as a mentor is how you go to bat for women poets. When I think of the type of legacy I want to create in the poetry community, I think of your example. Who else could have not just the vision for the Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat and Good Idea Summit, but also the generosity of spirit to make it happen with limited resources? What you have given the community is a series of unlocked doors, let’s say they are pink, for women to walk through in sequins or sweats and speak with power. What you have given me is myself. Rachel, you are an important person and your writing is so necessary.

Letter From My Heart To My Brain

By Rachel McKibbens

Its okay to hang upside-down like a bat,

to swim into the deep end of silence,

to swallow every key so you can’t get out.

It’s okay to hear the ocean calling your fevered name

to say your sorrow is an opera of snakes,

to flirt with sharp and heartless things.

It’s okay to write, I deserve everything,

to bow down to this rotten thing

that understands you, to adore the red

and ugly queen of it, to admire

her calm and steady rowing.

It’s okay to lock yourself in the medicine cabinet,

to drink all the wine, to do what it takes to stay

without staying. Its okay to hate God today

to change his name to yours, to want to ruin all that ruined you.

It’s okay to feel like only a photograph of yourself,

to need a stranger to pull your hair and pin you down,

it’s okay to want your mother as you lie alone in bed.

It’s okay to brick to fuck to flame to church to crush to knife

to rock to rock to rock to rock to rock and rock.

It’s okay to wave good-bye to yourself in the mirror.

To write, I don’t want anything.

It’s okay to despise what you have inherited,

to feel dead in a city of pulses. It’s okay

to be the whale that never comes up for air,

to love best the taste of your own blood.



Letter From My Brain To My Heart

By Rachel McKibbens

This house is dirty, but comfortable.

Behind each crooked door

waits the angry weather of a forgiveless child.

I cannot help but admire this horrible

power of mine, how each small thing

can become a death: the lost house key. A spoiled egg.

A howling dog. There is no prayer or pill for this.

It is a ruthless botany; I might as well

be buried in the yard. I have no one to blame.

Not the mother who sang to an empty cradle.

Not the Dog of Spite who bit my hand,

just this long-legged sorrow

who trails my every joy like a dark perfume.

You have my permission not to love me;

I am a cathedral of deadbolts

and I’d rather burn myself down

than change the locks.

***

Love Letter to Emily O’Neill, from Stevie Edwards: At the end of the 2013 Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat and Good Idea Summit, Rachel McKibbens arranged a ceremony, where we all got to tell partners the following words, “You’re an important person and your writing is necessary.” You were my partner. Telling you these words was easy; they were true. But hearing them back from you forced me to stare the need for my own writing in the face, to accept worthiness. We held each other; I think that’s what our poems can do for one another. When I think of your poem “Conditional,” beyond being beautifully crafted with a mastery of language far beyond your years, it holds a space open for me to face the female body, complex feelings about motherhood, the grief of miscarriage—all without shame. I want to write you room after room where shame has no currency, rooms to be brave in, rooms to love yourself fiercely in, rooms to survive in, rooms Rachel has unlocked the doors to. This is how we can hold each other in poems: by being generously and generatively disruptive enough to make rooms for each other’s work, by knowing these rooms are holy and worth making noise for. Emily, you are an important person and your writing is so necessary.

Conditional

By Emily O’Neill

At twenty I miscarried a child.

He would be school-aged now,

a terror on your hip. Instead

he dissolved like a clot kissed with aspirin.

I blame the brandy and the wine. Not

foolish enough to call it miracle,

I would’ve kept the bastard in my bed

if he had grown beyond a seedling. I’d be wrong

to think my recklessness a rescue. My boy

full of loose teeth. I won’t call it relief

when liquor stings the cut. He could’ve been aspirin,

a foolish kiss. He could’ve been

a rich meal slumped and stirring

in my stomach. Not three bloodless months

I paid no mind. Not a rosary of weeks

I thought my choices still immaculate.

He could’ve grown up a monster. Could’ve been bad

as the bastard who never knew I bled his baby.

I won’t talk about my future like that. Conditionally. I won’t worry

my wishing with a name I chose before I knew

what I’d be losing.