Five Poems
by Anne Leigh Parrish
The Suburbanites Visit a Nightclub
The girl dances in the center of the room and
in the corner you freeze
She’s just dancing, I say
But why must she do it here, where I can see?
Ignore her, I say
Can I ignore a fire?
The girl dances on, drunk, ecstatic, her joy
running its course like a fever
Drinks are served,
we don’t touch them
The girl twirls her last twirl and a laughing man
leads her back to their own corner
I’m fire, I tell you, but
you’re on your phone now, tapping away
You don’t know you’re about to burn
The Silence it Accepts
Betrayal is the broken promise you never meant to keep
(If you follow your own lights, and not those I assign you,
Do you betray me?)
(Was my assignment the betrayal?)
Betrayal is willful blindness, dismissal, ignoring one’s humanity
Betrayal might be nothing more than failing to
Grant you dignity
To allow it, even
To hear it speak
Betrayal is deafness and the silence it accepts
Strife
Paint-by-number sky hangs over the city at night
Represents all places,
Everywhere
Summarized
Light takes so long to reach us
When we see it, it’s all gone
Does starlight dim as it burns across space?
What I say today
Stings less over time
How young we were caused our strife
And all the bad stuff later
I’m sorry
If I pour life down the drain,
What’s left in the trap?
You
History
Witty zingers
arguments won
shame accepted
A mountain
on which to stand
and name the rocks below
We forget what they’re called
I’m as guilty as you,
my transgressions just as cruel
The mountain wears away
to a grassy plain where we
lie, ready to help each other back up
Even The Desert
When someone you love hates you,
You work so hard to bring them around
Water the brown plant
Floss your teeth
Get on the scale
No sweetness comes
To compromise is to lose ground
Hate is the hard surface, softened by the light-seeker
The brick wall clutched by a dark green vine
In the east, there are a lot of buildings like that
And the wet, damp smell of things lifting from the earth
In the west, water is scarce, thus cherished
No, I’m not sand, nor are you rain
We’re just mismatched
Yet, even the desert bloomsASK THE ARTIST/ASK THE WRITER
Ashley Holloway (AMVH): Hi, Anne! Thanks for taking some time with Unleash. We were thrilled to share your narrative with our writers. Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer?
Anne Leigh Parrish (ALP): Well, it’s been a long one, almost forty years. I began as a short story writer and stayed with that form until about 2013 when I began my first novel, published in 2014. I’ve written several novels since then and added poetry in 2018. Right now, I have three published volumes of poetry with a fourth due out in December. My new novel arrives this July. Taking in that long span of time it’s interesting to see how I’ve changed and also how I haven’t. I still have the same goals as a writer – to tell the truth and tell it beautifully. But while the artistic thrust has remained the same, the subject, or emphasis of my work hasn’t. I’ve gotten much more political over time, angrier if you will, about how women are treated and viewed as reproductive machines, not as human beings.
AMVH: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?
ALP: To trust your instincts. It sounds simple, and on the face of it, it is, but in my case the challenge came when my instincts changed over time. I think that evolution was a function of changing sensibility, or a different idea of what I should emphasize in my work. Domestic situations were always important to me, that is, family life, often between a man and a woman, or a parent and child, but gradually the larger world came into greater focus and needed to be presented as well I could render it. Then political issues came to be terribly important, I think as I watched the world of liberalism that I’d grown up with destroyed by the country’s reactionary right-wing.
AMVH: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.
ALP: I’ve been working hard on poetry for the past few weeks, and earlier pieces resonate anew. I’m including an entire poem here, if I may, called “Survey of the Female Experience,” from my first volume, The Moon Won’t Be Dared. It summarizes much – well, everything, really, about how I see the world right now.
The rib never fit
And the apple had worms
Fig leaves are for fools shaming the
Triangle of life
Caves sheltered as long as you brought
Down your share, felled by points you
Chiseled by the hour, in between
Sewing skins and putting the baby
To your breast—
Migrations, snow, death
Seeds sown, crops harvested
You:
Learn to read, get the vote, work on the floor
With a glass ceiling
Are told you are unreliable, emotional, a false accuser
When your boss grabs your ass
You:
Want to go on the pill, and your doctor
Looks at your ringless left hand, then says no—
You:
Get an abortion to free yourself of a burden you
Cannot carry, given you by a man who
Lied, stole, cheated
You:
Live in a country where the ruling party
Wants to own your womb
It’s their right, they say, because
They know so much better than
You will never:
Go back
Accept cruelty as fate
Apologize for the drive of your sex
Close your eyes to their blindness
AMVH: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?
ALP: For about eight years I had the immense good fortune to have Mike Curtis at The Atlantic Monthly as my mentor. He generously read every story I sent him, and I sent quite a few! In just a few sentences he was always able to point out where the story in question succeeded and also where it struggled. Despite his sage advice, I still wasn’t getting published, and it drove me a little nuts. I reached a point where my frustration level was so high that my mother, to whom I complained regularly about this, advised me to change tack and write about something else. Up to that point my stories were often about a woman struggling with depression and trying to find meaning in her life (which mirrored my own existence, I’m willing to admit now). She said I should write about my crazy family instead, so I did. That story, which focused on my parents’ divorce, was called “A Painful Shade of Blue” and Mike just loved it but didn’t feel it was quite right for The Atlantic. He suggested I send it to The Virginia Quarterly Review. They took four long frustrating months to respond with an acceptance. It was almost another year before the issue came out in the autumn of 1995. My story appeared next to a poem by Tess Gallagher. I was quite pleased by that, and even more pleased when I later learned that Ann Beattie’s first published short story had also been in the VQR.
AMVH: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?
ALP: I’m working on two titles for 2027, my fifth poetry volume and a new novel featuring my protagonist, Edith Sloan, who appears in An Open Door and The Hedgerow (which comes out this July). This is historical fiction, set in 1950, when women were wives, mothers, and not much else. Except that they always were, weren’t they? A great place to get to know me better is my website, anneleighparrish.com, and also my photography website, laviniastudios.com.
About the Poet:
Anne Leigh Parrish’s new novel, The Hedgerow, appears in July 2024 from Unsolicited Press. If The Sky Won’t Have Me, her latest poetry collection, was published in April 2023, also by Unsolicited Press. Recent titles are A Summer Morning, a novel; An Open Door, a novel, and The Moon Won’t Be Dared, a poetry collection. She is the author of nine other books. She has recently ventured into the art of photography and lives in the South Sound Region of Washington State. Find her online at her website, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. Explore her photography at www.laviniastudios.com. She lives in Olympia, Washington.