Two Poems by Aileen Keown Vaux
/Wanted
I am a hard little planet looking to warm my surface
against the light which Wyeth painted deftly.
Particularly the curtains he caught in the clutch of a breeze,
lace skins found abandoned in bedrooms.
Here is the body being lonely:
my head balances precariously like a boulder
as if my neck were a mountain peak.
When I see Helga my breath steals from my lungs;
how closely Wyeth looked, the attention he paid
to her strands of ginger hair levitating into a corona.
I am hungry and could consume this country
still warm from the oven. Without a body it is possible
to float like a wraith, lamenting with a tisk,
the way perfection lives outside the skin.
If only I tried harder: straight A’s develop into straight arrows;
in 6th grade I attempted a straight ardor, to love a boy
who played soccer; at any moment my neck could fail
and I could fall into the sea or crawl like the other woman
made famous by Wyeth--so close to the house
yet never any nearer than her desire to stand and flee.
Lost Heirs
He said he was there.
He said he heard the pops from down the hall.
He said he could process it
more quickly than the others
because when he was eight
his father was shot.
So he was prepared for the loss
of one of his students, a boy he taught
alongside two others.
It was one of those close calls,
a rural school with one brother
striking down another and I said to him
grief is sometimes a stone that grows
kelp on its hard surface,
submerged below the water,
that will rise above the bay,
slowly lifting until small wishing lines
appear on its face.
Again, I said, I understand.
Because my father was shot too.
All of which is true.
My job is to tell other boys
that our fathers are lost
and it does not make us stronger.
And then we sit in the office
and say to each other
I’m so sorry that happened to you too.
Author’s Note: (Wanted) In 2017 I took a solo vacation to Seattle and on a whim decided to see the Andrew Wyeth show at the Seattle Art Museum. I was vaguely familiar with his famous painting Christina's World, but was unprepared for the emotional resonance I found in the rest of his work. His paintings were vibrant and magical up close; his ability to capture light, astonishing. But I was left with this overall sense of a man who was really lonely and able to capture other people's rural, American loneliness-- I wanted to see if I could capture a similar feeling with my poem, "Wanted."
(Lost Heirs) In my day job as a career counselor for a local university, I work with students one-on-one for advising sessions. When I advise Education students it is inevitable that we have discussions around school safety and active shooters as part of their professional development. We had a school shooting at a small, rural school outside of Spokane in 2017, and shortly thereafter I worked with one of the student-teachers who was there on that day. This poem is about how nothing can actually prepare a person for trauma and how those who live in the "after" commiserate with one another.
Aileen Keown Vaux is a poet and essayist whose chapbook Consolation Prize was published in 2018 by Scablands Books; she wrote a bi-monthly column for Spokane, WA’s alt-newspaper The Inlander, and interviews writers for The Rumpus. She grew up in Yakima, WA and is inspired by the agricultural landscapes of Eastern Washington State and queer people who live in rural places. Her chapbook Consolation Prize is based on themes from the Central Washington State Fair.
