Contributor’s Marginalia: Chloe Honum on “It’s always the same party & everyone is nice to you” by Essy Stone

I was immediately drawn to Essy Stone’s cinematic poem “It’s always the same party & everyone is nice to you.” The opening lines drop the reader into “a trailer-park rager,” “a bacchanal / for us who work too many shifts for regular showers.” The tone is raw and unprecious, making me feel in the presence of a friend with whom I have no pretenses, no airs.

Occasionally, a poem will strike me as having a kind of elemental allegiance. Stone’s poem, to me, is an earth and fire poem. The speaker’s feet are not just on the ground but standing in a place where you’ll find “a gun up your ass when you sit / between cushions on the couch.” Grit and grace are interwoven, torn apart, and stitched together again. During the day, the speaker and her neighbors hangout in the yard, “shotgunning beers that dribble down our chins / to form dark grey dots on the gravel, dark grey dirt.” The ground in the poem is important, with its specific texture and color, and to it Stone adds the fire of the speaker’s internal life. “I got my daddy’s paranoia” she tells us, “so I fight real hard, in my way, to make sure / no man gets the measure of me.”

Part of what makes this poem so compelling is the way the speaker applies an equally rigorous gaze to herself as she does to her surroundings. Early in the poem, she asserts, “Brave. / I think hardship makes you brave.” Later, though, she revises her stance: “I should be saying / well not hardship exactly, but what you resolve to do without / & not bravery so much as perfecting your game face.” That a poem would revise itself as it goes is a somewhat audacious move, and also beautiful, as the moment allows us to see a mind at work—layers peeled back, stakes heightened. I’m reminded of Henri Cole’s poem “Self-portrait with Addict,” in which the speaker redirects his thought mid-line. “There is no place in the world—,oh, never mind. / This morning, my thoughts are disorderly, / like black hairs.” In a genre known for precision, the willingness that Stone and Cole exemplify to be a little awkward, to say “I should be saying” or “oh, never mind,” is tantalizing.

Written in long lines without stanza breaks, Stone’s poem contains many swift turns. Humor blends with sorrow, bravado with vulnerability, in a kind of stream of consciousness intent on authenticity. “It’s easy / to make folks love you,” the speaker tells us. “I’m clutch in a drinking game. / Steely as fuck.” These lines bring a smile to my lips and cause my heart to quicken at the same time. I find them at once emotional and playful, and admire Stone’s ear for contemporary speech. When newly colloquial, youthful turns of phrase work well in a poem, it’s like a shot in the arm, reawakening us to poetry’s ability to grow from and speak to the vital here and now.

If the poem starts as an earth and fire poem, then the ending is a doubling down. The final image is of Lucifer disguised as the Serpent—the creature that spends its life tasting the earth—and provides a metaphor for the speaker’s conflicted longing:

A fairy tale: when Lucifer disguised himself as the Serpent, I bet
he couldn’t resist dropping hints & almost blowing
the whole charade to bits. I bet he leaned hard on that sssss sound,
made too many knots of himself,
homesick for his ugly old skin.

The Serpent is surprising, as up until that point the imagery has focused on the immediate physical surroundings, yet the conversational tone makes it seem an almost natural shift. This is a poem that carves its own stunning path, one in which language both blazes upward and presses against the ground.