Excerpts from Catherine Theis’s poetry manuscript, Sophia, a finalist for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
TREAT YOURSELF LIKE A SULTAN
Sleeping. Dream
-ing. Dead. My head
washes ashore.
The female reoccurs.
The blackest hair
free from robe,
a hanging bob
under a single-dang
light fixture.
Faith does not
limit, doubt does
not limit,
imagination itself
is belief system.
Both rustic glass
& open flame,
the sweetest kill.
Hair longer than
neck & neck perfect
pitch in tower-dark
ruin. Little metal trays
under all served.
City of sweet tea,
divans, Ottomans,
eggnog softness, salep,
one hangman claimed
in the adoption of
uniform. You need to
buy a separate ticket
for the harem. So we did
closing down choice.
Tile magnified in blue
ossies, knucklebones
of concubines who
sat on marble counters
chewing stones.
The first Open Studio.
Gold leaf splinters
bedded down, up the
backside, inlaid work,
unreal mother-of-pearl.
Chimney stack in need
of more fuel. So she is
bored reading verses off
the wall, milky-white
ostrich lay up. Later
a whole wall of
extinguished cigarettes.
O love! turbulent,
unwelcome, magnified
in darkened dioramas,
the farthest from innocence
I’ve ever been, magenta
lipstick worn first as
practice, then chore.
What a kingdom,
the first socialization
of herself in secret,
private soldering.
Beauty fills & empties
at the same time.
∞
I allow St. Anthony
of Padova one wish.
A vanish, a let go.
Ourselves blue light
illumination & brochure.
Ceiling bound, Constantine’s
capital alienates,
enshrines an empire—
Avignon, another example
of how the spider bit
my cheek in my sleep,
how I slept in a bed
that lit up from
underneath, a florescent
nightlight hooked
to a motion sensor.
Dancing in a Turkish
nightclub in my dreams.
I woke to dress
my wound & listened
to the cats hissing
in darkness. The photo-
grapher rocks (mad
motion) in time
to the swinging
light, her pilgrimage
is chanting silent
motion, the fall
off stool. What’s the
duration here?
How many times
could it happen?
She’s in the gallery
right now, black jeans,
black tank top, oversized
white button-down shirt.
I don’t notice
her shoes because
she’s talking about
her notebook: photos
pasted in, then
photographed again
with a cheap camera.
No trick—it doesn’t
close. The milky white,
a glass of clear raki
clouds into prominent
white when mixed
with water. “Are you
religious?” “No, I don’t
pray, but I do make
photographs.” “I make
pilgrimages.” “Mysteries.”
“God be with you.”
Con Dio, I whisper
to myself, drunk
in a side street café
well after midnight,
whirling dervishes
fueled by candlelight.
∞
The call to prayer
five times a day,
strained throat,
a sunniness to cold
choice, the Italian
consulate at the top
of the hill we walk
down in search of
espresso, a lover’s
cough, shakiness, a drawing
itself, the glint
of mackerel’s skin
before shoved in
toast, a passing
shimmer. In a photo
I took two nights ago,
a man eyes us, his cigarette
uplifted. It’s not sexual, but
it’s not innocent either.
If we smoked we could
sit on carpets, watching
taxis & small trucks
jam up the street.
The photo is outside,
but what happens
inside me? Dearest angel
Gabriel, tell me how
it ends—does the spider
transform into two
butterflies & the inchworm
split several times
from its mama part?
The Sea of Marmara
opens just enough.
Ancient City, keep me
covered in red-halo,
salty recklessness,
dried chiles & fishes.
No new messages.
“Being happy means
being close to the one
you love.” No short-
cuts please, no suspicions,
no vanishings.
Related dreams: Sugarcane,
Home, Center, Tent,
Butterflies. I finally slept
through the night.
Related dreams: Coins, Rings,
Incense, Purse, Metra,
Pineapples. To drink pineapple
juice alters the taste-
appetite. Related dreams:
Saltwater, Cigarettes, Raki,
Mosaics, Pilgrims. When the
monster came, I longed
to be eaten alive
but woke to an empty
bed instead. I carry
a swatch of felt as
talisman & darken deeper.
I kismet embrace
the lights in photograph.
Paint is irrelevant.
The realization that I
scared my own monster
shamed me. Starry
night, open mouth—
you are my beginning
& beloved—skycrack of
tuberose & fruit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Theis is a poet who writes plays. She spent her childhood summers in Sicily, where she swam in blue coves and ate gelato before dinner. She once composed a sonnet to the sun and moon with ink from an octopus. Her first book of poems is The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Modern Poets, 2011), followed by her chapbook, The June Cuckold, a tragedy in verse (Convulsive Editions, 2012). Catherine has received various fellowships and awards, most notably from the Illinois Arts Council and the Del Amo Foundation. Her play Medea was a finalist in the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Woman Playwrights. Catherine is a Provost’s Fellow and PhD Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she also translates contemporary Italian poetry into English.
AUTHOR STATEMENT
Little Oranges
Longer than a minute
or a density of teeth time.
Pagan or libidinal energies
take up a lot of space.
That’s precisely point, no?
The poems in Sophia are about women, and the clear sound of a woman’s voice. In February 2013, I traveled to Istanbul and Rome with my dear childhood friend. If I remember correctly, the poems in Sophia are like a controlled hallucination, where visual and sonic layerings occur in the shortest lines imaginable across the long poem form. As usual, I wanted to write the experience of acuteness and contrariness into my work since I’m fascinated with themes of extremity. “Austere yet luminous” & “formal and conversational” is how I wanted the language to sound. For me, sound is the way to meaning, and sound works in measures of new and old time. Mostly, I feel like a tuning fork, my body sensitive to the pleasures and decadences and brokenness in love, in art, in darkness—knowledge blooming as corrupt white lilies. Sophia comprises of three long poems interrupted on both sides with aphorisms and photographs and the fate of a family. Yes, always the interruptions—
OTHER POEMS from SOPHIA: