Cry Baby Mystic

By Daniel Tiffany

Bobbing alongside Margery Kempe—an illiterate medieval mystic who dictated the first autobiography in English—the ragged voice of Cry Baby Mystic finds itself drawn into strange predicaments that are not its own and ferried into abandoned spaces by the gearing of stardom and shame. The revolving sentences overheard by the reader--a muffled chorus of Brechtian aftershocks--survive only as traces of sorrow now craved by all who have known it: sound gossiping the unsound, the excess of the pilgrim. A person climbs out and never comes home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643172040

Daniel Tiffany

Daniel Tiffany holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and has published translations of works by Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. His critical works include Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard University Press, 1995) and Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), the latter named one of the “Best Books of 2000” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His poetry, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Boston Review, and the Paris Review. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi Foundation in France and been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship. He lives in Venice, California and teaches at the University of Southern California.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of the following journals, where sections of this poem have been published (in earlier drafts):

Bennington Review

BOMB

Brooklyn Rail

Colorado Review

Denver Quarterly

FENCE

Flash Cove (Australia)

Iowa Review

Journal of Poetics Research (Australia)

New American Writing

The Tiny

Tupelo Quarterly

VOLT

West Branch

The creature stood still and would not answer.

Her cryings came but seldom; one bout a month at first, then once a week, afterwards daily. Once she had fourteen.

Her crying was so long and loud it stopped people in their tracks, unless they knew the reasons for her crying.

—The Book of Margery Kempe

Cry Baby Mystic

We know

just when to stop.

They deliver a mess,

we go by the book, whoever

it is.

Ear pitched

to the ocean

floor, clouds of furious

green, one creature held out against

our tricks.

Moon can’t

choose where it goes.

A spoon will do. Plucking

down signals she turned to eyeless

stone as

if her

crying bouts could

not yet be annexed to

listen her way in with her mouth.

Not yet.

Dead leaves

and dirty stars.

The door’s unlocked, she’ll slow

things down and gnaw your backbone half

in two.

Beggar-

bold honey swat

—god this place is freezing—

bareback telepath not just her

own thoughts

a horse

shows up half dead

with a hood pulled over

its head dreaming of what it’s like

to live

unseen.

I’m sure it won’t

be bribed with sugar cubes.

Use cold water, it’s faster, drain

the head.

Traffic

spins backward through

the glass redoubt—could that

be why scratchy names make a blue

moon bleed?

I know

you don’t just leave

a walnut sitting there.

No one would dare leave a walnut

behind.

That shack

where the road ends

weren’t nothing she know’d of,

red and dark red and dark. Nope, not

in here

you don’t.

Fool back out of

the smoke hold a candle

to your chin. Gorgon City.