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Tributaries: Jessica Bebenek + No One Knows Us There
In her debut collection No One Knows Us There (Book*hug Press), Jessica Bebenek explores grief both in its immediate rawness and at several years’ remove. For Tributaries, she shares the poem “On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather Died” as well as a companion poem, Christine Wu’s “My Father Says He’ll Come Home.”
Read “On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather
Died“ from No One Knows Us There
On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather Died
we got shit-faced. Crawled through the pubs of that town
with its illusion of smallness. The moon and its illusion of light. On that oh
so symbolically bitter October night, my father and I drank
like mourning and drinking is what we’d been born to do.
Everything about us
dragged itself home long before we could.
His soul nestled somewhere deep
in his hanging mouth.
His body naked, maybe
already burning.
We forgot
finances, bartenders’ names, basic geography,
all immediate and inherent dangers.
Tumbling out the long way
home, we followed train tracks over water.
The streets’ orange fading to deep blue deluge
beneath, that drop—
he tried to dare me to be afraid.
There was no approaching whistle, no distant light,
no hole big enough to lose anything.
Only this silly business of time
opening its coat to us, bloated
with existence, each time a body’s rocked
against mine, our limitless love, reckless grasp on life, my foot
plunging between boards, because I am full, heavier than the train
with the single light of my approach, heavy with empties rattling through me
that pull my whole body through the spaces between splintered grains, push my whole body to the water, to the rocks,
and stop. Hold me while I fall. My small
body in a warm lap. With infinite tenderness,
prepare my breakfast. Recall my name.
But there is no fall.
We went home.
Chose one board
and then another,
one street and walked down it,
screeching with the thing
that made us.
An interview with poet Jessica Bebenek
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to write “On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather Died,” and how is it representative of your collection?
Jessica Bebenek: No One Knows Us There is a collection of poems in two halves—the first written as I cared for my grandfather in palliative care and through the grief which followed; the second, written nearly a decade later, looking back to the first half to reflect on death as a portal, an opening-up toward greater understanding. “On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather Died” is from the first half of the book and is one of the poems in this collection which was truly written in the moment, expressing the rawness of death and grieving.
I wrote the poem because I had to, as an expression of my own confusion and sorrow. But in editing, I realized that this is a poem exploring the strange freedom of grief—how all fear drops away when the worst has happened. Most often for me, this has taken the form of not caring for my own life or safety, which is a topic thoroughly explored through the first half of the book. But here, I think we see grief take the inverse shape: of communion with something like the Divine. Here, we witness the Self exploding into the real truth of life which is the ongoing loss of love. Both grief and alcohol here open up space for desperation to bloom—a scream into the dark absence of a train which refuses to hit you. It is the inverse of the train scene in Stand by Me; the essence of adulthood.
This poem is one of five poems in the first half which tell and exhaustively retell the day of my grandfather’s death, cycling through the collection in the way that trauma cycles through the mind. My editor encouraged me to keep the messiness of these poems when I wanted to iron them out, arguing that it is this messiness which evokes the experience of grief. In the second half, I’ve rewritten these five poems, keeping their original names, to reimagine what death can be in one’s life—reinvention, beauty, new hope. In the mirror poem to this one, I write about my first date with my now-husband which, to our surprise, lasted three days. This new poem is not messy, but it twists and curls. It is sensuous. It retains the portal of the first, but while we stand on the precipice of the portal in the first poem, in the second, we have just stepped through and are seeing the trust and intimacy which is possible on the other side.
ALU: What drew you to poetry? What do you most value about poetry?
Jessica Bebenek: I have always loved poetry for how it gets straight to the bleeding heart of the matter. Good poetry doesn’t faff about with platitudes or long descriptions of scenery to set the mood. Even when poetry is subtle, quiet, and elegant, it is unrelenting and refuses to look away from the wound. A good poem looks directly at the discomfort and names it, unflinchingly.
That’s not to say that all poetry must be about pain. A good love poem, too, is steady in its gaze as it twists and bucks. As I realized while writing the second half of No One Knows Us There, staring into love is so much harder than sticking your finger into the wound and wiggling it about. Just ask Thomas.
Of course, I had to learn all of this through years of practice, reading and writing towards No One Knows Us There. Before I actually sat down and wrote this collection (the hardest part of “being a writer”), so much of my poetry was full of posturing and empty gestures. It was folk-punk musicians such as Kimya Dawson and Jonathan Richman who taught me that the truth is best stated plainly, unpretentiously. They taught me to loosen-up. You can do anything, say anything in your art—so why wouldn’t you lay it all out? Leave nothing behind.
ALU: Choose a non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection.
Jessica Bebenek: About once per year, I lay down on my bed and listen to the entirety of A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie (aka, Phil Elverum). This is because one listen per year is all I can handle. Through the course of the album, Elverum chronologically maps the days, weeks, and months that passed after his wife’s death which left him a single parent of their young daughter. The first song, “Real Death” opens on the day she dies and the album is, predictably, devastating. His ultra-pared-down lyrics and musical style are the perfect representation of grief, full of overwhelming quiet and sorrow in the face of beauty which persists in the world.
One the one hand, A Crow Looked at Me nearly convinced me not to write this book. Not maliciously, but because the most perfect artistic representation of grief has already been created. On the other, it deeply inspired me. Elverum’s total lack of pretention and diaristic style offered me a map to what I might be able to do if I were to get out of my own way as a writer.
I open the first half of the book with the opening lyrics of the album: “Death is real. / Someone’s there and then they’re not.” Because what else can you say when someone you love dies. Again taking Elverum’s lead, I realized that I had to let the book multiply in the second half. In both of our works, the songs/poems expand, almost reluctantly, outwards and into the living world. Because what else can you do when someone you love dies but continue to live. There is a simplicity to this which is in itself healing and which I’ve tried to capture throughout No One Knows Us There.
Jessica recommends…
“My Father Says He‘ll Come Home” from Christine Wu’s
Familial Hungers (Brick Books)
ALU: Why did you choose Christine Wu’s poem “My Father Says He’ll Come Home” from her collection Familial Hungers? What do you love most about this particular poem?
Jessica Bebenek: I remember when I first heard Christine Wu read this poem live at the Atwater Poetry series in Montreal. What stays with me most about this poem, then and now, is the condiment packets which are hoarded by the father. Not food, nothing actually nourishing, and yet in this tiny way he clings to and claws at the life he is certainly leaving. I am haunted by this dying man who grabs for what will not feed him.
I wonder at the similarities between our two poems—filled with the dying and dead men of our families. How different these two men were and yet the grief we express in their absence, reluctant as we have been to live through it, persists. It finds it’s home in our books which, through the alchemy of art-making, we hope will be a balm to others in their own grief. Christine and I will be touring our debut collections together (in the Maritimes in late April, and in Quebec and Ontario in late May), and I couldn’t be more excited to see how these two books weave into and around each other, night after night.
My Father Says He’ll Come Home
Soon, when he’s feeling better. My mother responds
The hospice is your home now. He requests
his electric razor, a mirror, his jacket, his back-
scratcher, and a thermos of hot tea. Small comforts
at the end of a small life, small attempts
to preserve an illusion of dignity,
not knowing the nurses have been asked to dress him
in his burial clothes when he dies, because we can’t
afford to pay the funeral home $400 to dress
the body. He spends his last days hoarding
what he can: salt, sugar, and pepper packets
that accompany his meals, as if he’ll need to season
the afterlife. In my dreams he’s taken away
by police, rather than ambulance, his just desserts
for screaming at my mother when he was hungry,
angry, sad, or confused. When I wake up, I’m crying
at the image of my father leaving the house
with nothing, no comfort objects
in his handcuffed hands. When I hear he’s been
stockpiling condiments, I think of the parable
of the talents, the man who buried his coins
because he was afraid. My father eats
the wonton soup my mother brings until he doesn’t
want the fucking soup anymore.
Reprinted with permission from Brick Books.
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Jessica Bebenek is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She works as a risograph printer and bookmaker at Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. In 2021, Bebenek was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism. No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry.
* * *
Thanks to Jessica for answering our questions, and to Book*hug Press for the text of “On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather Died” from No One Knows Us There, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). Thanks also to Brick Books for the text of “My Father Says He’ll Come Home” from Christine Wu’s Familial Hungers.
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