Caki Wilkinson
The first draft of “The Survival Expo” came out as a straightforward narrative, mostly just describing the scene I’d wandered into a few weeks earlier. There were a few solid lines and images, but I was struggling to find the poem’s center of gravity. Eventually, I decided to start over: using only the original first line, I rewrote the poem by hand as a single, unlineated sentence. This is one of my favorite ways to shake up a poem that lacks momentum. Instead of worrying about line breaks or language or form, I’ll just focus on keeping the sentence going. It can feel like that game where you dive all over the room to save your balloon from hitting the floor, but it usually helps me figure out what’s driving a poem and where I want it to land. That’s exactly what happened with the second draft of “The Survival Expo.” Once I understood the poem’s arc, I was able to go back and reshape the unlineated text. I did a lot of cutting (some of which became a separate poem), and I broke the text into three long sentences stretched across medium-length lines, which I thought suited the voice and sort of mimicked the action of winding through the aisles of a convention center. I also reworked the poem into a loose blank verse, which was already starting to surface at the end of the second draft. I don’t have anything high-minded to say about meter, but it’s sometimes useful for me in revision, especially with longer poems, since it makes me pay more attention to sound and rhythm. I doubt anyone would call this a musical poem, but the rhythm helps balance out the volubility—and probably says a lot about my own need to stave off chaos.
< draft >
the survival expo
It’s mostly men inside the Agricenter, pitching fallout shelters, bucket dinners, 30-minute background checks, the whole scene more than what my friend and I prepared for, my friend who says she’s finally feeling better, though all I do is compliment her hair, words I’m still eating while we make the rounds, and it’s not that I’m susceptible to a hard sell so much as lack the guts to back away or show the folks who knock on doors for God a 60-million-year-old femur, the way my ex did once (he had that sort of thing on hand, and not just bones but teeth and prints and coprolites), though this led to a protracted conversation with the religious people, who kept coming back for months, asking after him, he was never there, a stack of maglets growing by the door, the word on high no match for geologic time whose scale, I learned, can give a certain person comfort, responding to a bombing or catastrophic flood by evoking the longevity of minerals and atmospheric gasses, but I admit it doesn’t bring me comfort, one thing I bet I share with every person in the Agricenter, hawking their superbatteries and backpacks with pockets for your snares, except I still don’t have a plan for when the big one hits, not a single gallon of emergency water, so I can see why people in the Middle Ages might insist their skin was made of glass, why my cousins are devoted to their crossbows, my neighbor to her supplements and tarot, or why after dreaming I’ve been chased or choked or shot at, I like to rate myself, I swear I’m getting better at finding the trap door or saint in the subway car, and so for now, I let a shellshocked man explain the pet food he’s selling, packable and highly concentrated, was tested on cats, because dogs will eat whatever but cats are picky and, I guess, more prone to starve, it’s hard to follow really, and the only thing I end up buying is a card you can slip in your wallet in case you get held hostage and still have access to your wallet, that’s what it’s called: a hostage card—because you never know what danger you’ll walk into, like the Agricenter on a Saturday, and my friend is feeling better, done with chemo, and I don’t know what to say but can’t shut up, just keep on walking, floored and mortified, by all the ways we have to stay alive.
< final version >
the survival expo
It’s mostly men inside the Agricenter,
pricing seed vaults and metal shelters, knives
and MREs spread over dressed up tables
like alms for fraught apostles—Take, eat—
and we expected this, my friend and I,
but came in anyway, for fun, I guess,
except, to me, it feels more like a test
to prove how out of place we aren’t,
which, I’ll acknowledge, is flaw of mine,
this tendency to double down pretending
things are fine, a tactical response,
like when my friend tells me she’s feeling better
and all I do is compliment her hair,
how thick it’s growing in, how glad I am,
before I train my focus on the man
selling disaster rations meant for pets—
taste-tested, he explains, on cats, since dogs
will eat whatever but cats are picky bastards—
and see, his pack will hold a month’s supply,
and here’s a pocket for your gas mask,
and here’s a pamphlet about chemtrails too…
But it’s the truth we’re sorely unprepared
for even minor hazards, acts of god
and whatnot, living as we do along
a semi-dormant fault in Tennessee,
our billboards lit with shot theology
and ads that flash YES, SILENCERS ARE LEGAL,
so I can understand why there’s a line
for 20-minute background checks,
this being a thoroughly American
response to background checks, and fear,
compared to, say, the Middle Ages, how
King Charles VI, believing he was made
of glass, sewed iron bars into his clothes
and hardly moved, and wouldn’t let himself
be touched, so scared of shattering,
which goes to show: the kingdom of the self
will always be the hardest to defend.
I wonder what he’d think to see us probing
“superior illumination,” lamps
that burn for 40 days and charge your phone,
something my friend could use, she tells me, texting
a picture to her husband, who responds,
I think you ought to leave the Agricenter,
but then we get distracted by these cards
with punch-out tools that fit inside your wallet,
so if you’re stranded in the wilderness
or captured, and have access to your wallet,
you might save yourself. What can it hurt? we say,
and stand there for awhile comparing options—
snare locks, fishhooks, saw blade, handcuff shim—
because you never know what you’ll walk into,
and the Agricenter smells like kettle corn,
and my friend is feeling better, done with chemo,
and I don’t know what to say but can’t shut up,
just keep reloading wrong words through the last
packed aisles and turnstiles, back to Saturday,
appalled, of course, but not ungratified
by all these ways we have to stay alive.