First Seven Sevens (Remix) (2009)

First Seven Sevens, remixed by Dana Guthrie Martin

#1

There are no meds.
Another lucid moment.
Inside words hunger dries.
Paranoia’s ear comes loose,
howls through fields
remembers what it means
to drown.

#2

Another constellate goodbye.
Another tearful bedpan.
I like what you’ve done
with your forehead.
Inside the drowned,
at least one photograph:
heads thrown back.

#3

People felt things.
Edges. Needles. Casings.
Scratch & Sniff descriptions
of goodbyes often
belong on film.
Go read something
untoward.

#4

The computers are down.
Composes turns into compasses.
Bodies spin
like dime store tops.
Spiritualize all you want,
even a cave is full of sky.
Just sniff.

#5

They are revising deserts
into test sites again.
Dualistic thinking
brought us
sign and symbol,
hemorrhage and clog.
The sky never gets any credit.

#6

Moving symbols
conversant in slow-dancing
lend tranquilized
reassurance to droids.
Don’t forget
the enemies of glad:
Kick blood free.

#7

Keep tending your ego.
Dessert the color of night
skirts dazed magpies.
Awareness wears a hood,
dries in fragments.
Replicants prefer a belly
full of reassurances: We are one.


Dana's Process Notes:

The process I used was to strip all of Stu’s words out of his poem, “Sevens,” and jumble them up in a wordle. My initial plan was to remix the piece by using his words and only his words. But as with all plans, things changed. I started inserting some of my own words here and there as images came to me that I couldn’t shake and couldn’t create without using words that weren’t in the original piece.

In terms of structure, I wanted to keep the seven, seven-line stanzas because that form seemed essential to the remix. I noticed that I’d repeated certain important words in more than one stanza, and I decided that the repetitions should have some structure as well, so I placed the repeated words in adjacent stanzas as a way of threading them together.

I read Stu’s piece several times a few weeks before I started writing. But during the process, I didn’t revisit Stu’s piece at all. I wanted the words to take me somewhere without being swayed by how Stu had used them. I just went back and looked at the piece again today, and it’s amazing to read both sets of “Sevens” together. They read like a conversation. Even though most of the words are the same, there’s still a sense of different voices using those words, infusing them with meaning through tone and context.

I also just realized that I managed to leave the word “magpie” out of my version. I love magpies, and there’s no excuse for having left that word out. I just revised the last stanza to include the word “magpies.” Did you know that pies used to be made by placing a hollow ceramic magpie in the middle that would allow the heat from the pie to escape from its beak? I decided that my magpies belonged in my line about desserts. They fit right in there.