This week, the editors review three poems by Nick Lantz: “An Urn for Ashes,” “Starvation Ranch,” and “Ghost as Naked Man.” As a child, Nick Lantz was obsessed with paranormal phenomenon and the unexplained, from cryptids to aliens to ghosts…
For the first and possibly only time, we were in a recording studio within Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, which made us feel like we were on an episode of The View. This week, the editors review three poems by Nick Lantz: “An Urn for Ashes,” “Starvation Ranch,” and “Ghost as Naked Man.”
Nick Lantz
As a child, Nick Lantz was obsessed with paranormal phenomenon and the unexplained, from cryptids to aliens to ghosts. These days, he tells people he’s writing a book of poems about ghosts, though that’s only sort of true. His fourth book, You, Beast, won the Brittingham Prize and was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2017. He was also the recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship for his poetry. He lives in Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches at Sam Houston State University and edits the Texas Review.
“An Urn for Ashes” gets us started off on our a conversation on past lives and reincarnation. Lantz’s impressive use of language and imagery draws up ideas of present beings possessing remnants of those far in the past. Moving on to “Starvation Ranch,” the editors reflect on what memory and recollection look like in the modern era. The poem layers alluring images that are beautifully constructed and give us a front seat in recounting many summers past. The final poem, “Ghost as Naked Man” offers a reimagined commentary on gender as a social construct. Seemingly in conversation with other works on the topic, the poem conveys frustration and destruction, then pride, as expressions of manhood. It also brings to mind Ada Limón’s “After the Storm,” published in Issue 66 of Painted Bride Quarterly. Listen in for our takes on these poems and the verdicts!
Let us know what what you think about this episode, ghosts, red paint, and more on Facebook and Twitter using #WeAreStardust!
Present at the Editorial Table:
Kathleen Volk Miller
Tim Fitts
Sharee DeVose
Jason Schneiderman
Marion Wrenn
Samantha Neugebauer
Production Engineer:
Joe Zang
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An Urn for Ashes
The atoms that made up
Julius Caesar’s body,
burned on a pyre,
spread by wind and time,
have since dispersed
far and wide,
and statistically speaking
you have in you
some infinitesimal bit
of carbon or hydrogen
from his hand or tongue,
or maybe some piece
of the foot that, crossing
a river, turned a republic
into an empire.
But that means you
carry with you also
the unnamed dead,
the serfs and farmers,
foot soldiers and clerks,
and their sandals
and the axles of chariots
and incense burned
at an altar and garbage
smoking in a pit outside
a great city at the center
of an empire, that you
are a vessel carrying
the ashes of many empires
and the ashes of people
burned away by empires,
their sweet, unheard melodies.
And look how finely wrought
you are, how precise
your features, your very form
a kind of ceremony
for transporting the dead
through the living world.
Starvation Ranch
Frank Hite, my mother’s
father’s
mother’s
father,
named his farm Starvation Ranch,
and one July,
I balanced
high on a ladder
to repaint those white letters
on the same red barn
where they’ve been for a hundred years.
But that summer is a sketch, a note
written in the margin of a book I gave
away. I shot rabbits and learned
to drive and listened
to the same Lou Reed tape on loop
in the upper bedroom of my family’s farmhouse.
In a closet I found
my grandmother’s high school yearbook
in which she had crossed out the name
of each classmate
who had died.
I learned there are three kinds
of garbage—
the kind that goes in the compost heap
to feed the garden that grows the peppers and the corn,
the kind that goes in the ditch
to feed the coyotes who howl at night,
the kind that goes in an old oil drum
to burn
I learned to love the indentation
my grandmother’s pencil
left in the paper over a name,
like the tally marks
I carved into a tree for each rabbit I shot.
I learned that a stone arrowhead, taken
from a newly plowed field that has held it
for hundreds of years is still sharp enough
to cut my palm.
I learned to love the hiss of silence
on the tape after a song
ended, the sound of time
like the susurrus of insects at dusk, like a broom
whisking clean
the floor of some upper room.
I learned how to walk
the perimeter of the house and feel in the grass
the edges of the old foundation,
a version of house that burned,
that disappeared, that was rewritten,
and I learned how to walk farther out
into the pastures, to spot the earthen mounds
left behind by people who remain only
in names of rivers and country roads.
That was one summer. Decades
later, I learned that the barn I painted was not
even the original, which had been replaced,
board by beam,
years before.
And I learned that barns are red
because red paint
is cheap because iron
is abundant
because dying stars
sighed iron atoms
into space
and those atoms
gathered here
on earth, became
the earth,
became blood
and arrowheads
and steel girders
holding up towers
and the red paint of barns.
Ghost as Naked Man
“Gender is a kind of imitation of which there is no original.”—Judith Butler
Take away his beard, his hairy flanks.
Lick your thumb and smear off
his Adam’s apple. Lift away his penis
like a live bomb, and bury it
under a mountain. Hide the testicles
behind a broad leaf.
But look, he still goes around town
pointing at things he wants
and moaning, rattling his imaginary
chains. Every time he sees his reflection
in a shop window, he cuts a thumb
and with the blood paints over gaps
in his shimmering reflection.
Then he takes a brick and breaks
the glass. There, he says,
look what I made.
