Poem of the Week | September 23, 2013

This week we offer a new poem by Airea D. Matthews. Matthews is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and is currently a Zell Postgraduate Poetry Fellowship recipient at the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA. She resides in Detroit with her husband and four children, and is currently at work on her first full-length poetry collection.

Author’s note:

The poem, “Swindle,” started as a simple recollection of attending backroom poker games as a child. That memory spurred considerations around autonomy and forced maturity, or as Jean Toomer wrote in Cane “a growing thing ripened too soon.” Employing power, muteness and loss as predominant themes, I attempt to reconcile these fragmented memories with the embedded truth of my relationship to my father.

Inside the poem, the child is silent as the speaker continually issues the imperative. The absence of stirring begs questions about the formation of personal agency, like: what happens to identity when free will is stripped? What happens when subject becomes object? Does the imposition of personal sovereignty compel a fear-based taciturnity? And how can co-dependence usher in an unconventional power shift? These interrogations are meant to linger as the sense of danger heightens, and the speaker creates a manipulated game that his coerced child must learn to rule.

Swindle