Alphabet Year

By Devon Miller-Duggan

These poems started with a bag of children's beach toys--primary-colored alphabet sand-molds--and a quiet afternoon. They ended up needing a spreadsheet to keep track of the first words. "Love" is the "L" word for all the disorderly abecedarians because it creates a thread with which to gather all the ribbons of art, religion, human cruelty, anger, and the infinite intrusions by the random that both buffer us from a frequently distressing world and buffet us with that same world's constant noise. Because the proper abecedarians have a more orderly arrangement with the universe simply by virtue of progressing through the alphabet the way it's supposed to line up, the "L" words shift and wiggle even as the poems fun-house-mirror each other. Ultimately, the poems reach for peace without demanding either understanding, or patience, deciding that it is not only necessary, but lovely to dance with the monsters underneath our beds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532603099

Devon Miller-Duggan

Devon Miller-Duggan is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Pinning the Bird to the Wall (2008) and Neither Prayer, Nor Bird (2013).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following journals and their editors for publishing these poems (sometimes with different numbers):

Apeiron Review, Disorderly Abecedarian 10: Beware

Birds Piled Loosely, Proper Abecedarian 17: Belief

Disorderly Abecedarian 18: List

Proper Abecedarian 18: Divorce

Disorderly Abecedarian 20: Guide

Proper Abecedarian 20: HaShoah

Cider Press Review, Disorderly Abecedarian 3: Blasphemy

The Cresset, Disorderly Abecedarian 6: Hidden

Gargoyle, Disorderly Abecedarian 5: Calendar

Hollins Critic, Disorderly Abecedarian 12: Cup

Ink & Letters, Disorderly Abecedarian 16: Jive

Proper Abecedarian 16: Flora

Kestrel, Disorderly Abecedarian 24: Wedded

Rain, Party & Disaster Society, Proper Abecedarian 4: Eleven

Rappahanock Review, Proper Abecedarian 1: Turns

Proper Abecedarian 6: January

Red Paint Hill, Disorderly Abecedarian 19: Kisses

Rock & Sling, Disorderly Abecedarian 4: Kenosis

Disorderly Abecedarian 8: Theology

Proper Abecedarian 8: Introversion

Whale Road Review, Disorderly Abecedarian 2: Return

White Stag, Proper Abecedarian 7: Drowning

Proper Abecedarian 21: Tempest

Proper Abecedarian 23: Cloud

The Windhover, Disorderly Abecedarian 1: Beach

My further thanks go to the bag of sand mold letters that started this all; to my husband, Seamus, my first and best reader, always; the crew of Friday Nite Writes; the good people of the Thomas Parker Society Reading in Santa Fe (especially Jeffrey Overstreet for the best response to a poem I am ever likely to enjoy), and the Glen Workshops for being the ground on which these poems found their feet. Marci Rae Johnson is an acute and fearless editor who found an arc I had only vaguely sensed.

Disorderly Abecedarian 1: Beach

Querulous weather—rain on the ocean flattening sky—

indicators shifting breeze to breeze,

nerving blue beyond the pool—

voluptuary bubbles at one end, stillness at the other.

Menace in a kind of white

obligates nothinging.

Proposition: lines run—shore, dune, storm fence, grass, sidewalk, street, veins.

Zones of keeping or tending—

unfold, unfurl, unwind, unmove, unblur.

Ribboning sound from a child or gull.

Choice-broken hearts everywhere anyone older than a child.

Harvesting rest, breathing in salt.

Xeric heart unfilled, but sufficed.

Yenning dries the ground.

Kilter, off-kilter, on-kilter—presence of absence of welcome.

Fidgeting in the throat instead of speech

anatomizes emotion the way a raccoon washes its hands.

Walk away. Walk toward. Walk over. Walk.

Blithe as dying.

Joss for living.

Syncopy in the sky again—breeze intent, though.

Grind down into sand this heart. Push iron rod in and wait for lightning, for storm-made glass.

Love you can dig out with your hands.

Elision of sympathy and lightning—hard as pyrex hearts—

damage that pays the tithe—

torqued branches, wild transparencies.

Proper Abecedarian 1: Turns

And fall & the light tasting of good scotch, like

belief you don’t even need to swallow before it lights your tongue.

Catching up. Coming back. Cleaning off. It’s okay—you

dove fingers-first into the blue pool summer. Climb out.

Ends. Hinges. Folds (mountain, valley). Turning. Summer’s

fainting from her own heat,

grating her bare toes on sidewalks, self-abrading for penance.

Here the light pours like waking, even as it shortens. Dirt

inherits the leaves it fed.

Just as after harvesting, it’s good to cut things back to ground.

Kin to air all summer, your skin remembers separateness.

Limber all summer, your skin recalls contraction.

Much presents itself, absents itself—like family or

nerves shifting sequence—firing or frosting

or fluttering your fingers, your skin, leaves. Hinges all manifest in skin,

plain skin against the plain surface of shift—

quieting the way deer quiet before bending to feed. Air

rounds on us, carves us a cave to wear,

so wound about you—

too hungry for love,

unknowing what we knew, yet

voluptuary as eiderdowns,

weathering the bustle and turn,

xerosis of leaf and ground, then frost killing rot.

You can love your skin again because it requires you cover it,

zealous for keeping close.

Disorderly Abecedarian