Eat Me: What Does it Mean to Be Consumed?

 

|Lindsey Weishar, MFA, Verily Magazine (2019) 

 

Alexej Savreux’s Eat Me & Other Short Poems offers readers a glimpse into the somewhat disorienting world of the psyche, where multiple voices across various time periods crash over each other in a stunning wave of tremulous emotion, and everything from a broken relationship to the existence of God is examined. Readers are invited to enter into what Savreux calls these individual “poem portraits,” which resemble portraits in an art gallery. In some poem collections that utilize the painterly mode, each poem occupies its own distinct frame, but together the pieces help convey a larger story. In the case of Eat Me, readers encounter a fragmented multiplicity of stories. The reader’s task is to assemble the fragments, to accept both dislocation and disjunction of experience as part of the interior landscape that Savreux sets out to map.

 

The collection opens in media res with a poem entitled “Objet d’art 2.” Whatever the first objet d’art was does not matter. The object in question here is the human mind, no less. In lines reminiscent of Ginsburg in both length and expression, and abstract expressionism in its exploration of the unconscious mind, the poem opens with the rather grand: “A grotesque star has bitten the light my idle muse. Blanketed teeth nailed to the red amputation of / painted, contrasted artifacts!” The poems that follow are indeed “contrasted artifacts,” each unfolding a state of mind, and the voices of an array of speakers.

 

One voice weaving itself through many of the poems takes on the language of medieval courtly love flavored with a post-modern brand of Romanticism. In poems that utilize this voice, the speaker makes free of “thee” and “thou,” but his subject matter is also punctuated by the modern realities of city life. In “Hymning Harp,” for example, the speaker opens with an ecstatic examination of the beauty of music heard in the heart of the city: “A breathless gust, a breath from me as it beautiful, hymn sang, a hymning harp / a thing of Heaven serenading a church of thousands…” In the next stanza the speaker’s location is revealed: “I shall lay on a fire escape and listen to a melody; bright and near.” The music transfigures into human form as the speaker’s attention rests briefly on a beloved: “and this harp hymns til every melody is fixed with a rhapsodic kit / and a treat, like you, splays in a tobacco mosaic kind of flower / a shred’d heap of cigarette smoke soaked clothes, working stains.” Here, traditionally “high” and “low” language blend to reveal a world as seen through the eyes of a 21st century urban Romantic. Though the reader of today may be tempted to see the high language of courtly love as antiquated, Savreux transforms the tone by adding to it the instruments of a grittier reality, where city life embeds itself in pastoral.

 

Another voice running through this collection is that of a speaker who has been jilted in love. This speaker is cruder in his expression and troubles his poems with fantasies of violence toward women who have hurt him. In “Luxuria (Gabriella’s Body in Numbered Parts),” the speaker presents a memory of a woman who still haunts him. In breaking Gabriella into her parts, the speaker not only reveals the dangers of dehumanizing a once-beloved, but traces the way in which a person who has broken our heart can become monstrous to us: “Her flowering mascara tipped eyes / Murmur another absurd lipstick nightmare.” It may be that in the separating of Gabriella, the speaker is trying to organize his understanding of this woman after heartbreak. Though the language tends toward the reductive in this poem (Gabriella is referred to as a “bitch”), Gabriella clearly still has the upper hand with the speaker. She is still his “awakener of festivities.” She continues to haunt him.

 

In a similar vein, some of the poems in this collection reveal yet another voice: the speaker who grapples with a God or gods that seem to be both a fantasy the speaker has shed and a reality that still haunts the speaker. In “In Shadow’s Presence,” the speaker relays a story about a child who is afraid to fall asleep and the older sister who stays by him to comfort him. The speaker draws a connection between himself and “the crucified Christ way up above his bed / Longing for company besides the unruly dead” by the use of the word “linens” and the connotation of wrapping the dead: “These are the rituals of the buried, canonized blessed / The crucified Christ…” In contrast, the title poem of the collection “Eat Me” reveals an older speaker, clearly angry with the gods: “Eat me, I say to the Gods, a-hungry.” The speaker dislikes the silence of these gods, the “unanswered questions and unquestioned answers.” To them, the speaker directs a challenge: “Eat me, Bitch. And then I shall scarf on you, too.” These lines suggest a desire for mutual consumption that seems to draw on multiple connotations of what it means to eat. Is to eat to violently end another’s life or to grow closer to that life? As we eat, are we being eaten? What are we consuming and what is consuming us? 

 

Indeed, many of the poems in Eat Me enter into this duality of examining both the eater and the eaten. The speaker seems to welcome being consumed, and, at times, speaks from the midst of consumption. In “Beneath a Dripping Hourglass, Slow” the speaker seems to be falling with the grains of sand that mark the passing of minutes: “I am in the hammock of these items. About to fall into the lakes, pleasantly erratic, a cataract and I pray / on the knees. Such salivation, consumeth ye.” Instead of pressing against the passage of time, the speaker falls with it, is ensconced by this moment of falling. In “Sails,” the speaker is similarly consumed by the scent of “aphrodisiac lilacs malleable to the / rocking boats” and his own reflections, even as he takes in the beauty of the day. This desire to eat and be eaten is perhaps most disturbing in a poem like “God! She is like a milk” where a woman’s body is both rejoiced in—“O to be obscured by sky / A necklace fixed round a bosom of milk on plush cot”—and hollowed out until there’s nothing left of her but her very skin: “God! She is like a milk-white skin…” The act of eating, then, can be a violence toward or an appreciation for the eaten /eater. But the line between appreciation and violence is sometimes obscured in Savreux’s poems, and readers are left to decide for themselves just how the speaker is engaged in consuming or being consumed.    

 

Throughout these poems, one cannot help but notice what might be considered inconsistencies in grammar, spelling, and form in Savreux’s work. On further inspection, however, such seeming errors are actually an important part of the world Savreux is building within his poems. Language, like life, must be allowed to be messy, to move beyond the bounds of what might be considered “proper” or in vogue. The fact that Savreux sometimes adopts an older formal style of capitalizing every first letter in his lines signals both a nod and a thumb biting toward poetic form. Indeed, Savreux’s voice is most resonant in the mingling of forms—ode, free verse, pastoral, and prose poem all make an appearance in this collection. Nouns are transformed into adjectives (“quirked majesty”) and Savreux is not afraid to create his own words (“physicless”). The eccentricities that appear in these poems distinguish them. Though the poem portraits Savreux paints in Eat Me & Other Short Poems may at times be indistinct, there is much to be discovered upon multiple readings. These poems teach readers how to read them, to navigate their peculiar landscapes.