Contributor’s Marginalia: Kjerstin Anne Kaufman on “Kitchen Incident” by Jeffrey Harrison

One of an editor’s most interesting privileges is the power to place poems alongside each other in such a way that a kind of conversation occurs. Different voices, forms, styles, in the fortuitous happenstance of one magazine.

So I was drawn to Jeffrey Harrison’s “Kitchen Incident,” not so much because of the internal world of the poem, but because of the way that internal world had been opened up to speak into the worlds alongside it.

“Kitchen Incident” is flanked by guns.

On the left hand, Jess Smith’s “Lady Smith,” in which the narrator first describes a weapon as “dangling like an afterthought / from the flimsy of my wrist” until she takes possession of it and uses its tip to draw a heart on the sternum of the man she loves.

This is followed by a “Bulletin,” also by Harrison, in which the gun is an echo of echo:

The newspaper comes
a day late
to this remote lake,
with its headlines
on the latest shooting.

While on the right hand of “Kitchen Incident” sits Kathryn Nuernberger’s “Letter Home,” in which the miserable narrator caught in a domestic dystopia asks her spouse, “This is what people do?”

                    “It’s one of the things they do,” he says.
And then while the little she is stuffing a cracker in her mouth,
he passes behind her head so she can’t see him as he says,
“There’s also this,” and holds his finger to his temple as he
fires his thumb.

So there are the poets’ guns, unfired, turned into symbols of love, distanced and made bearable by the barrier of words, or existing only in invisible, phantom potential.

“Kitchen Incident” exists between. And I think because of this context, accident as it may be, I notice the poem, and the fragility of the speaker’s choice inside it.

Reminiscent of Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” “Kitchen Incident” contains its own fire, its own misunderstood father, its own deepening understanding of a past moment as it is memorialized in fairly unrestricted pentameter. As in Hayden’s poem, the speaker who felt bitterness toward his father as a young adult finds it falling away years later, although part of the emotion of the poem lies in astonishment at how long this has taken—only now, the poem begins, “after decades, even after his death / is the smoke finally clearing from that room.”

The smoke, then, has something to do with the self-enclosed blindness that did not allow the two actors to see each other, even inside the room of memory. Only now in the room of the stanza is it dissipating, so that empathy can enter.

I know that poems don’t always mean what they say. I know that the world of the poem doesn’t always correspond to the inner world of the poet. And yet I choose to trust that this poem means something sincere. The speaker wants to forgive and be forgiven.

And not until now have I bothered to consider
what might have happened in the office that day
or whether it was simply his frustration
at ceaselessly battling his acerbic teenage son
that led him to say, “You don’t know how to do
anything right,” then shoulder me out of his way
as he crouched down and reached his blue-sleeved arm
above the flame to find the damper’s latch.

At long last I wish I hadn’t told him
to shut up, and can let go of my indignation…

The poem conspicuously doesn’t end there, going on to detail the offense in such a way as to suggest that its formative place in the speaker’s mind will never be lost. In this way a somewhat “innocuous” tragedy stands in for the larger tragedies—injustices—we carry with us always.

And yet I return to the content of poem’s plainspoken resolution. In the middle of poems that grapple in various nuanced ways with the pervasiveness of gun-as-symbol in our cultural imagination, and which find their way out of their poem-world crises by ownership, by mirroring, by distancing, by projecting and so inspecting negative potential, this poem found its way out by creating a voice which, imperfectly but plainly, takes a little responsibility, articulates a lasting hurt, expresses regret, and so, to my mind, unclenches a tight bud that little, momentary bit against the gun-filled bulletins, letters, and love notes that comprise this world’s frame of mind.

Issue 15.2 ends with another gun, in Grasser’s “Ars Poetica”

You exercise our rights.
                                     You buy a gun.
You find paw prints, white with frozen dew,

and follow them through chest-high prairie-grass,

down past the chicken coop and barn.
                                                         You pause

to catch your breath and tally all you’ve lost.
The shell won’t load,
                               the safety won’t unlatch.

You turn it over in your hands.
                                              You see
your claws retract.

I love the shock of the close, a familiar one for poets: you are the animal you hunt. You are the carnivore you fear.

Grasser’s poem is, perhaps, more formally interesting than Harrison’s, a tighter, more sonically complex piece. “Kitchen Incident” may not have the captivating, complicated imagery or unforeseen move to agency that the astonishing “Lady Smith” contains, or the narrative layers of “Letter Home,” qualities for which I admire each of these poems. And yet Harrison’s poem helps me read them more—what can I say?—openly.

Yes, of course, the invisible weapon is in my hand, as it always has been. I also have exercised it against many I’ve loved, to my sorrow. But give me eyes to see. Let the smoke clear. So that I, too, can let go of my indignation.