pulling at the hem
of time unraveling my
self in the process
there is no health you whisper
only livingmy sick sick rose
A sick, sick rose is Maria Hardin’s perennial calling card in her debut poetry collection, cute girls watch when I eat aether. The poems of this collection drag along the soft and damning image of William Blake’s sick rose, introduced in the epigraph. This is our guide through the degenerating, regenerating, and tender obliteration of self crafted in these poems. Maria Hardin, a Swedish-American bilingual poet-artist, wields the fissures and slips between language, image, incantation, and body-ody-ody-ody to create a collection that abstracts its self into the sun.
In here, something is creasing while something else is spilling out.
The voice in Hardin’s poems occupies a feminine i, a self never capitalized, never proper, but always insistent on becoming something other. Something unexpected. i is the champion of Hardin’s experience with chronic pain, narrowing in on how a body fails, how language fails a body, how a body is subjected into nothingness. And nothing makes i holier. Because i is a new maria every time, praying to the patron saint of the perfect lucite heel. i is winking and flirting with that nothingness, calling oblivion cute names. i is taking her time deconstructing herself. Prettily, indulgently, spending time with what is found in that nothingness and what can come of it.
A poodle, a rose, a smattering of pain. i will smear all that and more all over her face.
These poems are full to bursting, tight and slight as they are, like a belly filled with too much water. Yet there is no telltale shame accompanying this feminine body that is too hungry, too violent, too decadent, too much. i is eating aether. i is eating whatever lies above. This collection is a witchy invocation echolocating what i once was, parting that cosmic junk layer by layer to find whatever’s left of young, whatever other lost daemon sisters who blow kisses back through the aether.
After all, what is all this becoming good for but to give a girl a stage. Give that girl-body a stage-poem. A wide yawn of nothing:
A poemperforming
a bodyperforming a
patientswallowing
Because something is dying here. Daughters, definitely. Bees, of course. All the things that offer up simple generation are finding their own ends. But not i, i is always more and then more. Standing on a stage illuminated by a single lightbulb, monologuing while bees drop dead all around. The audience is asleep. Or awake, and just not there. i will be standing on a platform, riffing, long after the theater has emptied:
i’m attempting telekinetic connections to clouds
but i just end up in THE CLOUD adblock
all the art bros of the anthropocene
that are having emotional responses
to the end of nature my body falls apart with the moon
Caught tripping down the stairs, i is splintering apart a catchphrase, some jargon, some remote pockets of Internet chatter, something familiar rent asunder. Minutely. Deliciously. Hardin says that these poems first lived on tumblr, a site that Twitter-x-insta-meta insists is dead and empty. And yet it generates. Funny how a dead thing creates. Can’t seem to stop, actually. So the poems carry that dead Internet frostbite and talk to themselves. Break apart the seams of packaged speech and intonate, anew, something else. Undo each piece that is caught between grinning, shiny teeth. Slang slung low on her hips, i comes and keeps coming.
As if that sort of excess could ever fill a void.
And can’t it? Can’t we fill dead pockets of the Internet with self-generating chatter? Can’t we latch onto languageless if we break words apart, strip them down to their sound? Can’t we push our self into nothingness if it’s full enough?
Maybe.
Maybe not. Oh, the imprecision of it all.
Because if these poems were exact instead of fragmented, maybe we’d arrive somewhere satisfying. Maybe that hunger would finally be satiated. But instead, i turns to you. Pulls you in, makes your body uttered and beholden. A wild strawberry patch, a binary pulsar, a mind. After all, your body is all. Your body is filling itself up and falling away.
This becoming is hard-won, and chronic. These poems are opening a secret door over and over again, letting us follow that sick rose into a back door wound. We watch that sort of opening that goes both ways, until it opens us too. We watch i try to fit her mouth around it. i is trying to fit it all in. i is trying to swallow but something is coming back up. And darling, it is so becoming on you.
A becoming so wide it will stomach the earth. Hardin’s poems will invite you in and swallow you whole.
cute girls watch when i eat aether, by Maria Hardin. South Bend, Indiana: Action Books, April 2024. 75 pages. $18.00, paper.
Kimberly Swendson is a translator and poet from Colorado. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her work can be found in ballast, Bruiser Magazine, The Marbled Sigh, and elsewhere.
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