Copia

By Erika Meitner

"The poems in Copia are about what is and what is almost-gone, what is in limbo and what won't give way, what is almost at rock bottom but still and always brimming with the possibility of miracle."—Rachel Zucker

Erika Meitner's fourth book takes cues from the Land Artists of the 1960s who created work based on landscapes of urban peripheries and structures in various states of disintegration. The collection also includes a section of documentary poems about Detroit that were commissioned for Virginia Quarterly Review.

Because it is an uninhabited place, because it
makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of
Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories
absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-
oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.
Vines knock and enter through shattered
drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort
cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable
puzzles.

Meitner also probes the hulking ruins of office buildings, tract housing, superstores, construction sites, and freeways, and doesn't shy from the interactions that occur in Walmart and supermarket parking lots.

It is nearly Halloween, which means
wrong sizes on Wal-Mart racks, variety bags of
pumpkins extinguishing themselves on the stoop

children from the trailer park trawling our identical lawns soon
so we can give away nickels, light, sandpaper, raisins, cement.

Erika Meitner was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Best American Poetry 2011, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938160479

Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk (BOA, 2022); Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia (BOA, 2014); and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Believer. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner lives in rural southwest Virginia and is currently a Professor of English at Virginia Tech.

Book preview

I

LITANY OF OUR RADICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH THE MATERIAL WORLD

Objects around us are emitting light, transgressing,

are discrete

repositories—

tropes, backdrops, ruination, lairs.

Objects around us are blank and seamless,

suffer from an arbitrariness,

are habitual or habitually

absconding.

Objects around us can be carefully etched

or stitched on top of our skins,

dismantled and placed in the trunk of a cab.

Objects around us are Oh my God.

Objects around us shimmer in air-colored suits,

in flesh-colored suits,

are waiting to be caressed.

They breakdance when we turn away.

Objects around us depend on fracture and fragment,

are picked clean, derelict—

shudder

like hostages without blindfolds

or tout survivability

by trilling in the wet grass.

Objects around us are durable,

glow relentlessly

as if they’re actually immortal.

Objects around us are not strangers.

They are the ruins

in which we drown.

Objects around us are expecting again,

blanket things with feathers

to offer refuge

but tremble anyway.

Objects around us wrap us in compassion,

sing an ode to something,

take the long way home.

Objects around us are no substitute for anything.

Objects around us moan.

Objects around us wander the aisles,

take everything of worth,

flee, exit, make off, vamoose.

Objects around us dismantle the city.

The doors are wide open. Go in.

NIAGARA

White towels folded into swans

with heads touching—

their hearted bodies trail

the floral bedspread: polyester,

used over and over again.

The bed itself casts a shadow

on desolate paneling.

O bed. O motel. O girl

in white pants—you are voluminous

and shine like the glossed doors

on rows of identical love shacks

punctuated with all-weather

lawn chairs out front.

Clouds ride past the pool,

faces of brick, the oil stains

on parking lot asphalt.

Did someone teach you

to park in a place like this,

between two white parallel

lines stretched like arms

saying come here? In the grass

behind the dumpster you lay

your head on his pale, shirtless

chest. On his skin, warm as

melted butter. It is the blue hour,

floating on quiet water, after

the sun sets, before dark.

Love on damp pavement. Love

with sanitized glasses wrapped

in paper. Love in the violent mist.

In the velvet night. He kisses

the soles of your feet. O girl

in white. Be good and take care.

I haven’t fallen like that in a very long time.

BIG BOX ENCOUNTER

My student sends letters to me with the lights turned low.

They feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui.

Like intervening and kinetic and tumult. He strings words together

like he’s following a difficult knitting pattern. He is both more

and less striking without a shirt on. I know this from the time

I ran into him at Walmart buying tiki torches and margarita mix

and, flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic

shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned

to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest,

the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hipbones. I write him back.

I tell him there are two horses outside my window and countless weeds.

I tell him that the train comes by every other hour and rattles the walls.

But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation,

but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water. Like sugar in water.

I dissolve. He writes enthralling. He writes epiphany and coffee machine.

He is working in an office, which might as well be outer space.

I am in the mountains. The last time I worked in an office, he was ten.

I was a typewriter girl. I was a maternity-leave replacement for a fancy secretary.

I helped sell ads at TV Guide. I was fucking a guy who lived in a curtain-free studio

above a neon BAR sign on Ludlow Street and all night we were bathed in pot smoke

and flickering electric pink light. Here, the sun goes down in the flame

of an orange heat-wave moon. The train thrums and rattles the distance,

and I think of his chest with the rounded tattoo in one corner and my youth,

the hollows of his hipbones holding hard, big-box fluorescent light.

CORRESPONDENCE

I drive around in my small, old Honda Civic

and play music that reminds me of driving

the same car when it was new but no larger.

The Civic held four people, but now, with the car seat

and its five-point safety harness, it holds three.

There are Goldfish crackers ground into the floor mats.

My husband is the bassist in a local bar band.

They play