The name alone intrigued me when I started. “How to braid an artery” is a striking title, yet when I actually began to read the poem itself it served more to confuse than to provide more intrigue. Or perhaps both?

 

     But then the intrigue hit again, drawing me in and catchin me hook line and sinker. A poem that opens… with a quote. The poem opens with a quote, seemingly unrelated to anything at hand talking about the cycle of football players injuring themselves. Now of course the opening line of the poem proper after the quote includes “with the velocity of pigskin”, but does such a tangential connection really make sense was going through my mind at the time. 

 

     The more I read, the more nothing seemed overly connected, but I wasn’t frustrated: I was fascinated. The diction used such strange, foreign punctuation, it took a moment to get used to reading and much longer to understand the purpose of. 

with our eyes:

 

     :: an event

is just a set of things. a Sunday ago I:

 

Connecting the end and start of lines/stanzas with colons, then in-between sections dropping non-sequiturs also connected by colons. I tried rereading the first stanza, and the quote, but I didn’t understand what bearing this had. I finished the whole poem and was utterly confused, but again: fascinated. So many questions I wanted to unearth: the poem felt like it had heart behind it, it was addicting to read and reread, but hard to understand. Easy to start, difficult to “finish”: from the strange formatting to seemingly jumping between time, places, meaning, and theme. The Narrator was consistently inconsistent… and that made it all the more appealing to read into.

 

     But I eventually hit it, a breakthrough. After rereading it four times more, I realized something. The strange punctuation, the : :’d intermittent lines, they’re context. It’s serving a purpose similar to that of brackets, like the narrator is adding in something for extra context. The narrator was “discussing god with boys I will never see again” and “laughing with the velocity of pigskin” at an event, it is the set of things a sunday ago. Once you can get that out of the poem, it becomes so much more coherent to read- it really hit me, and felt so good. To finally get that out of the poem, to finally start to truly digest it through layers and layers of complexity, was satisfying.

 

     Understanding the formatting was something of a key to the kingdom. I started to get it. The theme became more clear, or at least one of the themes of the poem: memory, and/or legacy. The poem was constantly talking about it, talking about “I remember the city like a demarcation, or a divet in coffee”, a Sunday ago, so many things are in the past or are directly affecting the past slash are affected by the past. And not just the past but memory, what happened and what sticks with you. You’ll get something similar from a cursory glance when you first read it, but when I started to reread it and I got the formatting this theme became even more evident. “My body, preceded me by three centuries at least” about the past affecting the narrator, how they know the city and how the city has changed them. Writing something different on their tombstone, all on the theme of something left behind. 

(The City of Aleppo syria. Possibly related to the poem itself)

 

     I could have left it there once I discovered that. Part of me was saying to, because it seemed like the natural conclusion. But something interested me about the poem: not all the pieces were put together. We had legacy, but the intro quote: and especially a segment near the end. “The deads grammar”, “canisters of similes in my basement”. There was something else the poem was getting at. But what could it be? “I braid the sameness with which we bleed”, it doesn’t seem to fit. I read those parts over and over again, and finally it came to me. The second theme of the poem. Legacy, yes… but also death, and what’s left behind. And how the dead or the broken are remembered. 

 

     So much injury throughout the poem, injury and death as a legacy affecting the current generation and what the current generation leaves behind in that regard- and how they come back from it, and why they come back from it. “Canisters of Similes” in of itself is a simile, and directly connected to a line prior to it in regards to tolls on a wall “like linebackers”, that connection to the opening quote. Varicose veins in the asphalt, enlarged and prominent. Death and Injury are being tolled, are being talked about and remembered. These injuries are both leaving a legacy in the city itself and in the characters. Sculpting is a very key-word, as to sculpt a rock you break off parts of it to end up with a finished product.

 

   To come to this conclusion, to find the themes of the poem, gave me an appreciation and understanding unlike what I already had prior for it. The evocative, slightly eerie diction at play elevated and created an atmosphere that only served to heighten it’s themes. It was hard to understand at first if not intensely intriguing, and very challenging on a first read- or 10- but when I started to put it together, it became a truly powerful poem.