WORTH BURNING
by Mickie Kennedy
A gay man looks back on his complex, abusive Southern childhood in this poetry collection.
“I feared AIDS,” Kennedy’s speaker declares bluntly in the opening poem, “and Cindy feared / being alone, so we forged a compromise” (“The Pact”). The speaker fulfills his role of heterosexual husband to Cindy quasi-dutifully, killing “dozens, then hundreds” of beetles to maintain his “aggressively healthy” roses and grilling brats in the backyard (“Beetle Graveyard”). But the actual orientation of his desire is clear—he covertly meets up with his gardener at an airport hotel (“Sheraton by the Airport”) and grows erect as he watches a man in a public restroom “piss[ing] loud, full throttle, a mist / of drops against his legs” (“Oasis”). Kennedy moves deftly from Cindy’s salt-craving pregnancy (“Having It”) to the speaker’s own childhood, a time of profound confusion and disorientation. His father is killed by a drunk driver (“Accident, 1982”), leaving him with a brother and a violent, alcoholic mother who sexually abuses him (“Small Bother”). Cruelty and discipline characterize the speaker’s turbulent childhood; he overhears his friend being beaten after the two watch MTV (“Turning the Key”) and receives a black eye from his classmates, which his mother ignores (“Open Secret”). Returning to his adult life, the speaker finds a lover, Randy, and comes out to his mother, who responds with skepticism and denial (“Out | comes”). Kennedy’s clear, novelistic narration is broken up by two poems titled “Mouth of Many Endings”; these are fragmented, abstracted interjections in which “a mother marks the water’s anger / the child failures into length.”
Kennedy is at his strongest in passages of acute, glistening physical description. Images jut out at the reader, hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory—a father’s amputated little toe, a “dangling comma” that is “purple // in a frosty jar”; a mother’s backyard “burn barrel” in which a “donut caramelizes / into a small fist.” These objects, defamiliarized yet recognizable in Kennedy’s quasi-prosaic language, stand in for everything that is unsaid and unsayable in the speaker’s life, the sublimated strangeness that cannot be named: “Every house a house / of sin,” the speaker and his mother observe, “besides our own” (“Until We Saw Our Faces”). The speaker’s tenderness for his mother is profoundly expressed in poems like “Snapshot of a Girl Refusing to Smile, 1956,” where he pities her hardscrabble North Carolina childhood and her loneliness, even as he points out that he “never wanted to be her son.” One or two poems hit duller, more expected beats, particularly in the framing poems that provide an entry point for the denser, weirder childhood material. The scenario of the rendezvous with the gardener feels well worn, for instance, and “No Leaks,” a poem about a suicide attempt, is glancing and vague. (“At the hospital, I learned to paint butterflies. / I watched the anorexics pick at their meals.”) The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens.A stark, startlingly beautiful collection.