Given to Rust

Given To Rust

By: Vievee Francis

About the Author

Vievee Francis was born in West Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. Her honors include the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Kresge Foundation, Francis currently serves as an editor for Callaloo and teaches English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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Poetic Devices

The poet Adrian Matejka describes her poems as “revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history.”

Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal more than I mean to. I can’t stop tonguing them, my teeth. Almost giddy to know they’re still there (my mother lost hers) but I am embarrassed nonetheless that even they aren’t pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning, like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud, and said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice. I can still sing some. Early cancer didn’t stop the compulsion to sing but there’s gravel now. An undercurrent that also reveals me. Time and disaster. A heavy landslide down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me what you really wanted was for me to stop speaking to you. To stifle the sound of my voice. I know. Didn’t want the quicksilver of it in your ear. What does it mean to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen all day until the water rusted its way in. And there I was putting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.