Inventory, and: Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey

Inventory, and: Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey Carlie Hoffman (bio) Keywords poetry, Carlie Hoffman, teddy bears, childhood, nostalgia, girlhood, teacher, education, contemplation INVENTORY At sixteen I worked at a Build-a-Bear in the mall,stuffing the soft skins of teddy bears. During my shiftsI sat by a big machine as children lined up like cars in a drive thru, or hungry mouthsat the counter of my grandparents' luncheonette in Liberty, New York,in-between wars. The children looked like children. I worea denim button down and khaki pants. Before stitching each animal shut, I'd pluck a tiny, satin heartfrom a plastic bucket like a pomegranate seed.One child made a wish, then another. It was not for me to askwhat the wish was, only to gesture to where within the cavern the heart would go.After closing, just as spring shadowed the parking lot with the first signs,I'd bring a pencil and notepad to the back of the store and take inventory: shelves of toy animal skins stackedon metal scaffolding—young men sleeping soundly End Page 70 in the barracks—the stockrooma cathedral in repair.Beneath muffled light, I count the hairsticking to bottles, the second used condom, seeds in a pomegranate.Within his glassy dome, snow is falling as Hades takes Persephonedeeper inside the replica of girlhood. End Page 71 TEACHING THE PERSONA POEM AT RAMAPO COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY In another poem with a doll, this one by Ai, the speaker'slittle sister drags her doll through the mud in the openingline. The speaker of the poem is a fourteen-year-oldboy, who, just now in the poem, if you want to bereductive about it, murders his family,and you can say, as my students are saying, the boyis a sociopath, which, in life or a newspaper, the boycould be described as, if this were a headline, but in the poemthe gender roles glare like four sharp cornersof the room, or nuclear family. The sister's muddied doll is a pointof view the speaker takes with him as he packs up and exitsthe scene. In class, I ask my students to describe to each otherthe feeling of rage before it rises from the body,if desire rots like an apple without song. Buber believedthe truest I does not exist without a you, dialogue the placewhere desire and expression converge and the animal gallopsextravagantly toward the flame of her knowing. I don't knowif here I am the woman returned to the scene of disaster, transfigured,the apple inside me rising from the edges of my body as speech.Outside the classroom window, snow falls, unencumberedby a wind from nowhere the night Eurydice chooses to stay. End Page 72 Carlie Hoffman carlie hoffman is the author of When There Was Light and This Alaska (Four Way Books), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry, and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. Carlie's honors include the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review poetry prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Loose Translation Award, and fellowships from Columbia University and the City University of New York and her poetry, translations, fiction, and criticism have been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Columbia Journal, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents, and many other publications. She is the translator of the monograph artbook Weiße Schatten / White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023) and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger's Blütenlese (Hanging Loose Press). Carlie lives in Brooklyn, where she edits Small Orange. She has taught at Columbia University and NYU and is a lecturer of creative writing at the State University of New York at Purchase. Copyright © 2024 The Massachusetts Review, Inc