See the Wolf

Set against the cultural milieu of the 1980s, See the Wolf tells the story of violence against women and girls through retold traditional fairytale and myth as well as the specific narrative of a single mother and her two daughters fighting to define their own lives.  See the Wolf looks unflinchingly at sexual objectification and the uses of gender stereotype, physical threat, violence, and predation to control woman and girls.  “What are the chances,” it asks.  “that a man who flashes his teeth when he talks / doesn’t bite?”  Always sensitive to the dangers of their surroundings, trained to flee or to flight, these women ultimately refuse the role of victim being forced on them and instead take ownership of their narrative, as they learn “To fear is animal. / To create out of fear must be human-“

Sarah Sousa is the author of the poetry collections See the Wolf (2018) named a 2019 ‘Must Read’ book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, Split the Crow, and Church of Needles. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Yell, which won the 2018 Summer Tide Pool Prize at C&R Press, and Hex which won the 2019 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, North American Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Verse Daily and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Her honors include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She is a member of the board of directors of Perugia Press.

SELF PORTRAIT WITH MABEL, ROSE, LILLIANNE, FERN, MILDRED, BEA

My mother named me
little old lady. Named me
startle-easily, little-flincher,
night-terrors-with-spiders.
I lived in a different century.
I was born rural
in a city of mills.
My mother named me
place of unreachable hills.
A temperance movement of one,
I was sober
as spring water. I was old
then I was older.
My mother named me
may-your-body-never-
surprise-you-with-want.
I was her easy pregnancy, asleep
by eight, awake when convenient.
I held the fetal position
like a moral obligation:
her ribs were unmolested
as a Victorian birdcage. They pried
my soft bones like ancient pottery
from between my mother’s hips
while she slept. An orphaned monkey,
a baby of the ’70s,
I sucked the bright orange nipple
of a sterilized glass bottle, held
by some other woman
while my mother came-to. She name me
Mabel, Rose, Lillianne, Fern, Mildred, Bea—
names I wear like tarnished jewelry
pinned to the inside
of my bra for safekeeping.
They take turns speaking
through my mouth, choose
my handbags, prefer flat shoes.
The embody the word habit,
placing a napkin atop my glass
of water, one beneath to absorb the sweat,
carry a magnifying glass
to read menus. With them
I’m always the youngest in the room.
And nothing changes. They name me not-yet-
born, but predict a natural birth.
They ask:
do you believe us?
does it help you to believe in us?

YOU ARE NOT GRASS

The last wild passenger pigeon was named
Buttons because the mother of the boy who shot it,
stuffed the bird and sewed black buttons for eyes.

People with Ekbom syndrome imagine
they’re infested with mites.

It’s possible the entire Buttons family
developed Ekbom, an aspect of which is
folie à deux (madness between two),
where a person in contact with the sufferer
develops symptoms—as in an actual infestation.

All wild things have kleptophobia:
the fear of being stolen, as well as cleithrophobia:
the fear of being trapped. I did, after
the divorce and my mother began dating—
fear of being adopted by a man
wearing slacks and old fashioned shoes, (automaton
ophobia?) who winked at me and promised to return
my mother at a decent hour. Whose accent
was Southern, who pronounced his R’s
so long they became words in their own right,
words at the ends of words; his R’s
like grappling hooks, like a crocodile-
purse with yellow eyes.

Why is the fear of being trapped a clinical phobia,
while the compulsion to slit
and stuff a thing not listed in the DSM?

Nature permanence is the healthy acceptance
that you are not grass but human, beneficial
if you suffer from hylophobia (fear of trees)
not so helpful if you have Cotard delusion
and know you’re not only human, but a corpse.
Related to Cotard is xenomelia: the feeling
that one’s limbs don’t belong to the body,
chirophobia: fear of hands. And worse,
apotemnophilia, where a person disowns
the limbs, yearns to live life

as an amputee. Why the insistence
that an animal have black buttons,
yellow marbles, key holes for eyes?
that its entrails be replaced with horsehair
and rags? that the peppery dots
swarming the blanket aren’t mites? What are the chances
that a man who flashes his teeth when he talks
doesn’t bite? To fear is animal.

To create out of fear must be human—
slits to let the mites out,
steel shot like beautiful beadwork
studding lavender breasts. Phantom limbs
when real hands become too dangerous.

In lines both disruptive and alluring, See the Wolf startles us back into the skin of our adolescent selves.  With sonic panache and sleight of hand, Sousa makes perfume out of he hypnagogic fears that permeate our girlhoods: the fear of being stolen and the fear of being abandoned, the fear of being trapped and the fear of being eaten alive, the fear that “one’s limbs don’t belong to the body.” These poems dazzle and sear, rocketing through the dark expanse of our collective girlhood.  It’s scary stuff, but so gloriously lit that we stare when we know we should be running away.
-Karyna McGlynn

Sarah Sousa’s See the Wolf is a startling work of survival and excavation.  The poet carries the broken keys and torn maps of her matriarchal inheritance and opens as many doors as she can to bring a lineage of predation and fear to the light.  Dwelling both in fairytale and in an 80s childhood with her sister, mother, and fleeting cast of abusers, Sousa shows how “a daughter is housed inside her mother” and how a “banished self” can nest even inside one’s own body.  As a reader, I clutched page after transformative page, marveling at her gifts for bringing intricacy to the fractured, endurance to the dangerous, and a red-toothed and moon-limned lyricism to the narrative. Such achingly perceptive poems.
-Jennifer K. Sweeney

April, 2018
61 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN  978-1-933880-66-2