Seeing the word “fire” recently, I was reminded of the unsolicited advice I got from an older white man who told me my writing was “too hot” and needed to be cooled down. Seriously? Too hot for what? For one thing, his comfort. You see I wrote a poem in response to the poem “Parking Meter” – in which the writer – a man named Dean Marshall Tuck – compares paying money into a parking meter for time to park his car with paying for time with a prostitute. As if the two were somehow morally equivalent. A woman’s body and a parking meter. As if it was ok that he slipped a few lines about paying for prostitutes into his otherwise apparently sentimental poem about how limited our time on earth is. The feedback – which came across as “it’s not that bad really – c’mon smile honey” – not only did not cool me or my poem down, but instead really set me on fire.

Did I mention I didn’t ask for his feedback?

He had offered to introduce me to the journal editor so they could consider publishing my “dis” poem in a future issue. I told him it was pretty bold and very pointed and he said “oh yeah, they love that kind of thing.” But once he read my poem, no introduction after all. Just the advice that I needed to “cool it down.”

Since then, this same journal – Rattle – has published poems comparing women’s bodies to corkscrews – tools, mind you. Apparently with our arms held out overhead and our legs spread we look to them like a bottle opener. It is part of a larger poem about a grown man who would hang out just outside women’s dressing rooms. A man who confesses to have ridden on elevators with women for a year during which time – enclosed in a small box with this stranger – he would ask them about what they were wearing so that he could make suggestions to his middle-aged wife back home. Apparently her choices in clothing didn’t sit well with him. He wanted her to wear wide-leggèd jeans, like the women he approached. And then there’s Paul Jones’s poem “On finding a bit of Theodore Roethke’s poem “I Knew a Woman” inside a chocolate bar I bought for you,” about devouring a woman as if she were a chocolate bar. Something to unwrap and consume. It’s mathematical. Logical even: Clothes = wrapper. Woman’s body = consumable object. Male love is proven by consumption. Male satisfaction is achieved in the woman’s disappearance: “And the chocolate. I’m afraid it’s gone.”

This has me thinking: I need to write an essay about this journal and these poems. This is not a quibble about craft. It is an exposé of a selection of poems masquerading as “sensitive masculinity”— the cozy errand to pick out Legos for grandchildren as moral cover — a selection aesthetic that launders purchase, surveillance, and consumption as tenderness. These thinly disguised “sentimental” pieces in fact celebrate the objectification and subjugation of women and girls for male gratification. Sometimes the poems not only document but are intended to do this work. For example, in a 2015 Brooklyn Poets interview about his writing, then 59-year-old Arthur Russell was asked what he was working on. His one-line answer: “A poem that can make a woman take her clothes off.”

Let’s begin by considering Arthur Russell’s corkscrew poem. I want to share my reflections on this dangerous – yes, dangerous - poem with Russell’s wife. And tell her that she’s married to a man who is spending time approaching women in enclosed spaces – where they “can’t escape” – and to whom he is a stranger, about their clothing. But I am getting ahead of myself — first things first.Russell’s poem “Among Other Things” includes lines recounting a conversation with his wife in which he tells her she’d look great in those jeans and she responds that she already has something like them. His response? “No you don’t.” That’s right. He’s in charge. He knows better. Domination through language. But don’t you worry, he will convince her in the end. After all, he tells us as much: “She couldn’t escape.”

And since I’m getting more specific, I think I’ll go ahead and quote a few more lines, the ones about the wine opener (such a handy little tool):

“… she holds
her arms out like a wine-bottle opener, then
lowers them slowly,
which draws my heart right out of my chest. But
the weird part, and thisis the part I’m reluctant to tell, is how, in my life,
which has been going on
for a while, when one of these moments where
something I’ve wanted but thought wouldn’t happen occurs, like these
wide-leggèd jeans”

Yes, it is weird. How when something we really want to have happen but think won’t happen actually does. Like wide-leggèd jeans. Seriously? Yes, they actually published this. But back to the lines. The “other things”:

“I’d watch the young store clerks refolding
clothes that had been tried
and rejected. I loved to watch them fold
sweaters, jeans, anything really;
they were so bored, so deft, with plain,
unconscious competencein their soft fingers smoothing the fabric ahead
of the fold. And there,
at Target, as I waited outside the dressing room,
I watched another guy
sort of my age leaning with his elbows on his
shopping cart handle clickinghis phone till his wife came out, and a young
woman stuck her head out
one of the doors and called to her mom to come
see, but her mom
didn’t hear, so I turned to the mom, and I said,
“Mom, she needs you.”I like stuff like that, where I fit into life.”

Let’s see what we have here. We have an older man spending hours watching young clerks – I’m guessing girls – folding discarded clothing outside dressing rooms. Why? Because he loved how bored and deft and plain and unconscious they seemed to be. Like automatons. Their soft fingers smoothing the fabric. And there’s this: “and the fold.” This man is not only objectifying and making inanimate these “unconscious” clerks, he’s also sexualizing their touch. The fold, a vagina. A young one. Perhaps unconscious.

And then he notices another guy who is sort of his age who is leaning against his cart focusing on his phone. Not on the young store clerks who Russell imagines might be unconscious sexual objects with soft fingers smoothing folds. The other man waits for his wife and leaves. But not our Russell. He stays. He wants to help.

And then suddenly—

“a young
woman stuck her head out
one of the doors and called to her mom to come
see, but her mom
didn’t hear, so I turned to the mom, and I said,
“Mom, she needs you.”I like stuff like that, where I fit into life.”

That’s right, reader. He calls her mom “mom.” And this just makes him feel so good that he’s found a way - another way - to insert himself into life. Not his life. Not the mom’s life (she’s probably his peer). But into the life of the girl in the dressing room who is trying to maintain her privacy, poking only her head out and asking for her mom. She didn’t ask for him. She asked for her mom. And he levels himself with her rather than the mother when he calls out with, “Mom, she needs you.”

But it doesn’t end there. It trails off into an attempt at sentimentality and then - as if that wasn’t enough - religious closure and redemption. Perhaps this is the “among other things” part:

“my mind calls out the name of my first friend
Andy, who withdrew
very early from life, how this happiness makes
you think about that otherhappiness you had and it’s not like I see his face.
It’s just his name
anymore—Andy—that comes to mind, like
kissing the spine
of a prayer book and reaching out to touch the
passing Torah.”

This, dear reader, is what is called a non sequitur. As in, it has nothing to do with anything that came before it. More technically, in philosophy it is considered a fallacy. How did we get from wide-bottomed jeans to a faceless Andy touching the Torah? From the beginning, where Russell tells us:

“For the longest time, like a year, I’d asked
random women on elevators
where they got their wide-leggèd jeans, and
report back to her.”

Imagine it: a year of him surveilling and harassing random women on elevators. Trapped in a small space with a strange man they don’t know. And him asking about where they got their jeans. Because he is looking at their jeans. He is looking at their bodies. And he is giving himself permission to ask them about the jeans they have pulled onto their bodies. And then — reporting it back to his wife. For a year. Watching. Questioning. Intruding. All of it taking place in spaces where they “couldn’t escape.”

So how is it that “the weird part” – the part that he is reluctant to tell us – is about how he got her to wear the wide-leggèd jeans? To throw her arms up over her head in celebration of how right he was. Like a bottle opener ready to serve, she is reduced to a mere tool. Because to me the weird part – the dangerous part – is this grown man bragging about having spent a year confronting women about what they were wearing while trapped in elevators with him and him lurking outside of women’s dressing rooms.

And then there is this weird thing: the introduction of his dead friend, Andy. A name with no face. Kissing the spine of a prayer book. Where did this even come from?

The cumulative effect is not idiosyncrasy, but an editorial appetite that treats women’s bodies as objects to be surveyed and used.

What are we to make of all of this? Perhaps it is this: that there is no redemption for these men. Men who publish poems written by other men who see women as objects that exist for their own pleasure. Describing their joy at watching girls who are bored, with plain, unconscious competence performing mundane tasks as if their mere existence were solely for the enjoyment of these men.

So many
soft fingers—

(so bored,
so deft)

smoothing
fabric

ahead of
the fold

(a vagina
unconscious)

the sounds of
coins dropping into

so many
rented holes

(stuff like that—
where I fit into life).

***

References

Brooklyn Poets. (2015, December 21–27). Poet of the Week: Arthur Russell. https://brooklynpoets.org/community/poet/arthur-russell

Jones, P. (2025, Summer). On finding a bit of Theodore Roethke’s poem “I Knew a Woman” inside a chocolate bar I bought for you. Rattle, (88). https://rattle.com/on-finding-a-bit-of-theodore-roethkes-by-paul-jones/

Russell, A. (2024, Winter). Among other things. Rattle, (86). https://rattle.com/among-other-things-by-arthur-russell/

Tuck, D. M. (2024, June). Parking meter. Rattle. https://rattle.com/parking-meter-by-dean-marshall-tuck/