Contributor’s Marginalia: Jane Zwart and Amit Majmudar responding to Majmudar’s “Last Words”

Halfway through last September, I tweeted about a painting by Mikhail Nesterov: Angel on the Holy Sepulchre. I paused and spent a sentence on this seraph not because she was a beauty, though she was, but because, unlike almost all of her kin in art history, she looked sleep-deprived. Amit, whose writing I loved but whom I’d met only once, replied, and he turned that quirk of observation into a prompt: “Write a poem called ‘The Sleep-Deprived Seraph.’” Soon after, his poem of that title landed in my email inbox. Followed by only a bracing fragment: “Your turn.”

And this dare—part curiosity, but mostly generosity—set in motion a month of what Amit named “mirror-writing.” Each day, one of us sent the other a title, taking turns, and each day both of us wrote a poem to fill in that newly outlined, waiting space. It worked on me like a magic, and there’s no acquitting the debt I owe to Amit for it. I know he would wave my accounting off—and with some reason: he has conjured amazing poems through the back-and-forth. In fact, we’ve repeated the magic on a smaller scale several times, now, and a number of those sibling poems have appeared in print, whether in pairs or singly.

Anyway, much as I loved all three of Amit’s verses in 32 Poems 18.1, I found myself finishing “Last Words” wondering how Amit might deploy its play of sound in a poem called “First Words.” How would he repurpose the vowel in “the Ah of Ah, I get it now, and of Ah, I’m hit, / and of awe, of awe / before the last thing no one has found a way to say”?

So when David’s kind invitation to “Contributors’ Marginalia” fell on the same week that Amit and I were to go another round, mirror-writing, we started with “First Words.” And it seems right that Amit’s poem of that title is full of liquid syllables, a metamorphosis of sense and sound, and mine full of the uncertain thrill of trusting a magic—mirror-writing—that still feels new.

—Jane Zwart

First Words
Amit Majmudar

Madonna of the Pomegranates,
Madonna of the Poem: Adoration is
matrilineal. An ointment-eyed scrunch always
maps itself to the breast.
Mitochondria pass from
mother to child: This
much is hers alone. The
mouth howls for its hole’s sole
maker. Lips press and part, press and part, little
muscles blinking like gills, like sleepy gypsy
moth wings brushed awake. The baby
monitor picks up static from another planet,
Mars maybe, or farther out, past Jupiter where fathers
mark the time, chiseling
marble sundials with a feather’s blade. Kids grow up at
Mach speed, don’t they? Tongues
multiply on their tongues, asking for more, mehr,
más. But the first word holds all the rest en
masse, one word, bawled out when hungry, later,
murmured with a drowsy milk
mustache. It’s as universal as the
Moro reflex. Lips press and part and
marvel at this word that was in the beginning:
Ma.

First Words
Jane Zwart

Sing in me, O Muse, or, if that is asking too much,
kiss me. Leave your chewing gum in my mouth

and I will sing around it, the malleable pebble
your tongue has wrung of its sweetness, the nugget

you could not quite skin of the comic on its wrapper.
I will sing the bubbles you blew and buried

back in the pink. I will sing the indistinct braille
you bit into the palimpsest. And then I will spit

the putty from my mouth, and patch the song—
first words, at last. O Muse, I sing of anti-invocation.