The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube

I learned about Richard Siken through Pinterest of all things. For those of you who frequent Pinterest, especially those dedicated to romantic pairings from books, the boards are littered with snippets of poetry rendered in retro fonts. Bits of Siken’s poem Little Beast kept showing up in my feed. However, finding a copy of his Yale Series of Younger Poets poetry collection was challenging and I had to special-order it from the UK. Since it is only sixty-two pages plus a forward, I thought I could tear through it in a couple of hours.

I was wrong.

Crush is an appropriate name. It could have also just as easily have been named, Smash, Suffocate, Annihilate, or Devastate.

When I bought it, I read the first couple of poems and decided that I was not in the right headspace to consume it. Or, as I came to find out, be consumed by it. I had this in my TBR pile for a year before I was ready.

Looking at the tiny book, tagged with no less than a dozen sticky notes marking my favorite lines, I felt like a teenager again, poring over liner notes, tiny text printed in CD and cassette booklets.

Louse Glück, the former United States Poet Laureate and judge for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, wrote in the forward:

This is a book about panic…. The poems’ power derives from obsession, but Richard Siken’s manner is sheer manic improv with the poet in all the roles: he is the animal trapped in the headlights, paralyzed; he is also the speeding vehicle, the car that doesn’t stop, the mechanism of flight. The book is all high beams: reeling, savage, headlong, insatiable.

I took my time this time and went through it over the course of a week. Despite my description above, it was not difficult to read. However, I read each poem a couple of times, going back over specific lines as they revealed a fresh patch of meaning with each pass.

Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is.
― Richard Siken, Crush

Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.
― Richard Siken, Crush

Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars
for you? That I would take you there? The splash
of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube?
― Richard Siken, Crush

You’re trying not to tell him you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.
― Richard Siken, Crush

You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.
― Richard Siken, Crush