Small Potato #4 : Pris Campbell

Small Potato #4 : Pris Campbell and her collection, abrasions from Rank Stranger Press

Your car rumbles east along the Cape,
headlights searching the blacktop
for your other life.

These lines from The Silence of Memory hold what this collection wants to portray to the reader. There exists more than the “you” of this poem within the entire collection. The poems are more about the narrator’s attempt to find herself, whether she is teasing a past lover about being gone, “You rub your eyes to find / that only the rustle of sea air / marks my empty seat.”, or in an attempt to understand herself as in the poem Shrinkbait:

Thoughts unfurl through
my brain nightly, set loose
by the storm of awakening.

He asks me what does it matter-
these endless questions without
answers. He inquires if our
insurance will cover a shrink.

I shrug, use my toes as a rosary,
imagine quarks eating dead skin
and wonder if Copernicus would still
declare my head round after consulting
with Einstein on space and pi square.

The narrator travels very well worn roads that every one of us at one time or another will find ourselves walking. She is in love with an older man, or so she thinks, because of the allure of that image: she’s fifteen, he’s too much older and living the life of an adult and in the end leaves that young love/lust for what he hopes will work, and she turns around to find herself with someone her age. But with someone who cannot cross over from virginal adolescence to the adulthood actions she has now become accustomed to.

When I turned sixteen,
Leon married a flat-chested violinist,
moved away in a great rush
of baggage and loud kisses.

I developed a crush on a boy down the block.
Tommy played snare drum in the marching band
and looked like Al Pacino in that later Godfather movie.

Despite all of my attempts to entice,
Tommy never tried anything more
than thrusting his tongue
down my throat and touching
one breast on our porch,
moths circling the light above us
and Ma Nature thundering disapproval
with flashes of yellow
at the foot of our suddenly silent street.

As I read each poem on to the next I would fall into the images and the thought of how our perceived idea of love changes throughout our lives. We can be held in rapture for a moment and believe it will last, but a few years, or even just months, will pass and we now have a totally different outlook on what constitutes love. How can we one minute know this other person is the one, then the next have that person holding us down, either physically or emotionally? Pris Campbell dives headfirst into these situations and does not hide any emotion in what these moments brought.

From Cross Town Train

Here in this first stanza we are put in the image and the emotion:

i fall beneath the belly
of this man called my husband,
trampled by his sweaty thrustings.

And here in the last stanza we hear her pleading, her wish to be somewhere else: that this is not what she had envisioned would be.

yesterday, the train killed a dog
loitering too long
with his bone at the crossing,
but who cares about one dog’s life,
when it’s all i can do
just to breathe, bite my lip,
and lie here listening
to that damn baby cry
in the distance.

In understanding love and relationships through these poems Campbell attempts to let the narrator understand herself. In the end I am not sure she ever finds that love or what it is she is searching for within. Can we ever actually find what we want in another? I think we can, but the narrator here has yet made that realization:

On the eye of the last full moon,
he pointed to a hole in the sky,
said it was his heart.

When I looked again, he was gone,
and the hole closed with a flash of
purple and blue, colors woven
into the bodice of my grass stained dress.

This, from In a Flash, is her past, her present, yet the future will have to be experienced, lived, then decided upon. She cannot believe what others tell her, instead she must keep throwing pebbles into the water until the waves are large enough, white enough, to wash away any and all fear of being in love.