Poems by A.M. Hayden
A collection inspired by artistic women
Editor’s Note: When I started planning for The Apologist, I’d thrown out all sorts of ways to describe what I was looking for. I kept stumbling on the phrase “academic dissection of low art,” and I was particularly frustrated by it: I didn’t actually see what *I* love as ‘low art,’ even when, arguably, it is. (For example, I just finished YOU, and I have to say: HATS OFF to the writers, the way they blurred the lines between meta and tropes and the ‘good’ reader, but also the way they showed that dark fantasy only exists because of dark reality, and, of course, rubbing the audience’s nose in their own complicity. Did I love it? I LOVED it. Should I pretend I love it less because I know that’s what is expected of someone who can easily lecture on Proust or Joyce? Absolutely not.) Anyway, digression over: I didn’t know how to say “explain why what you love matters, even if no one else gets it” without somehow implying that something was ‘wrong’ with the initial art or art object in question.
So I gave up. I decided I’d just look for essays and go through them until I found things I loved. I’d solicit from writers I know have as little shame as I do about joy and finding love in strange places. I got lucky and the first few writers I’ve worked with immediately got it: voice-y, but also to-the-point— something beautiful about something that maybe doesn’t look beautiful to everyone. The connection between The National, Ross Gay, and sports? Magic. Sonic as an anti-nihilist hero? I’m almost embarrassed I didn’t see it before.
I was completely unprepared, then, for today’s perfect submission.
The whole time I’ve been scheming about what this website could be, I never saw anything but a pop culture essay landing pad. Then along comes A.M. Hayden and her beautiful poetry about women who have made an impact in her life, given her hope in a dark moment, given her a line that she could hold on to, or even someone she can see, at least in their art, a mirrored version of self. Well, if I’m being honest, poets do that kind of work at least as well— if not better— than essayists. There’s no over-explaining. There’s no explaining at all. It’s visceral and powerful, but it allows YOU (forgive me that, haha, I’m still living in that finale) to participate in that same mirroring. You get to become a whole hall of mirrors: these women have put themselves in the cultural landscape, their art has echoed, Hayden has written beautiful poetry about it, and you are the next link in that chain. Happy National Poetry Month! Thank you, Mandy, for allowing me to publish your beautiful work here.
Rock n Roll Rattlesnake
For Juliette Lewis
You look in a scything mirror when you put your lipstick on
Lungs full of studs and glitter, desert skeletons and highway neon
Black leather sacrosanct stage, Medusa arms forged into knives
Sunset watch with your soul each day, Kali rage and Saraswati sunshine
Pixie sweetheart missus, tongue coated in hammer rust
Blow your hot kisses with lips of black licorice dust
You lick this world with a peace sign engraved ice cream spoon
Never too eager, nighthawk howling at our waxing moon
***
Mermaid Voices
For Tori Amos
(previously published by Fevers of the Mind, May 2024)
For an atheist, she was terrified of ghosts, preferred hiding under floppy hats
as little girl snake charmer, picking up a hissing garter on the trail to give
it a rub against her cheek, cooing, it wants me
to be its mommy, interrupting her own story
about reading Virginia Woolf, who waded into the river with rocks
weighing down her pockets to drown the voices, to wash away life
they told her she was crazy in the same tone you give
a woman a compliment, in admiration, in objectification, in transaction
she knew to look to a woman to take care of her, to look to me
to stop her from stumbling off cliff’s edge as she danced daises
through her garnet hair, as she ignored locals’ warnings and glided
her backstroke in the cloudy Rio Grande, she told me she wanted a mamba
tattooed across her belly, but feared the pain
sweet sting of infusion in her tender blushed skin, pink as a suckling piglet
told me this as she swirled her one neon sandal from her fingertips,
orphaned by the other still crevice wedged somewhere during canyon climb
every guy she knew pointed her in the direction of her own destruction
accompanied her to the edge singing sweetly to steady, to give
illusion she could not stand on her own, clove cigarette smoke and mirrors
when she was 11 her mother locked her in the bedroom closet, she told me,
she screamed inside the slatted door as her mother recited scripture
nearly choking on her duty to drive the demons out, she remembered
her mother’s jaw trembling when she spoke in tongues, my
mother would have been the one burning the witches, she said
she always liked toast and she swore she would burn out young too
just to spite her, her aching arms wrapped around herself,
snuffed out before she could be stripped of her beauty
and this is why I only feel air when I reach for her, she was always ether
her words echoing against canyon walls, plunging deep into ocean’s abyss
still waiting for shrilled chorus of mermaid voices to summon her again
“give me life, give me pain, give me myself again” from Little Earthquakes, 1992.
***
Thank You for Getting me Through It
for Tracy Chapman
You Sing Moon Honey Baby
You Howl Hollers and Mountains
You Hum Revolution Refrains
You Whisper Cloaked Wolves
You Peel Bark off Guitar
You Make Tender Promises
You Cross your Sincere Heart
You Stand at Crossroads
of Smoke Signals and Social Justice
***
Jerusalem
For Lauryn Hill
You sing your psalms
Your redemption songs
Your father-forgive-them wrongs
You rebel, your rebel throat raised
Your formidable voice breaks
You’re face up, tea cup baptized by rain
You tell the woman’s story
Your assurance we’re lion worthy
You’re tuning out that lyin’ Enemy
You are blessed in you reign searching
Your thirsty desert to Zion’s hills reaching
You’re strumming quiet nights Jah-seeking
You conquer the past, shove regrets aside
Your temple to our merciful God purified
You’ve become the branch, plum fruit, and vine
***
Plans
for Dolores O'Riordan
fell through her hands
supplication on loose soil
defiant dirges on unguarded
precipice, kneeling, rocking
back and forth, her splintered
stricken ship a shaken lament
trickling murmur shapeshifts
into keening tongue lineage tied
implores the apparitions
sea songs for the faithful
departed, a requiem
for her keen grip
salvation, devotion
under her fingernails
A.M. Hayden is the current Poet Laureate for Sinclair College and award-winning Professor of Humanities, Philosophy, and World Religions. She has received several pedagogy recognitions, including the League for Innovation Teaching Excellence Award (2020), and the Distinguished Faculty Scholars Award (2024).
Her debut poetry collection, American Saunter, released December 2024 (FlowerSong Press). Her first chapbook, How to Tie Tobacco, and second full-length collection, Old World Wings: Poems of Europe is forthcoming (Wild Ink Publishing). A Pushcart Prize Nominee and River Heron Review Editors' Choice Winner, she lives on a windy little farm with her family and many rescues including their blind, three-legged wonderpup, Vinny Valentine.
