Noel Pabillo Mariano

---------

After Adultery

The house smells wrong--
a bowl of oranges turned blue.
While brushing your teeth, you spit
out more red than white foam,
watching it swirl clockwise down
the drain. Everything is thick
as sin. Outside, the morning fog
clots the sky and refuses to burn
like the olive oil skimming the bottom
of last night's dinner pot left
on the stove. You think back
to the days in biology lab where
you learned the basic building block
of forensic science, that no one ever
escapes without leaving a piece
of them at the scene of the crime. You
rinse with mouthwash and inspect
the crevasses and caverns of your mouth,
pink as the skin that you dragged
your fingers over. This is supposed
to mean something, but all you can think
about is that above your head,
a spiderweb long since abandoned
holds the dried husks of flies.

Breaking Ground

I want to break the stillness of this home
with gardening; the hissing of the sprinklers,
the clink of the shovel as it hits
against the rocks and bits of cement
cutting dirt through the task of the day--
that any expectation I can bring to this garden
between the laying of the topsoil and the babbling
of the water hose, between the rising
heat from the earth and lemon blossoms
opening up, can be gathered and reaped
both of us mindful of the summer heat
with temperatures which make flowers bloom,
and my brown skin burn.

The Spirit of Grief

...............Once he's in, there's no point in fighting him, no matter what he smells of―motor oil,
burning wet wood, or English Leather. You must be attentive to him in a million small ways:
massage his feet, offer him your warmest coat, softest chair, and a bowl of egg drop soup. The
last person he visited before you let him watch true crime television shows and sang Sinatra's
“One for My Baby” to lull him to sleep.
...............He enjoys lavender, how their tiny spray of petals sweeten the air. And when the lavender
and its soft scent vanishes like fog cobwebbing the sky at sunrise, he's still quietly there; but
walking alongside your teenage daughter. Even though his gentlest touch will mark her with a
sudden and sharp pain like a paper cut, she won't understand. If you warn her against him, she
won't listen. Even when she starts wearing his scars on her wrist like a bracelet or a shield.

---------

Noel Pabillo Mariano Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand

Your poems are rich with metaphors and imagery--including smells--many from nature. How do you decide which metaphors and images to use, and why do you choose to turn to nature so often? How do you understand these decisions in terms of your voice?

I grew up in an urban environment then ended up going to school (for both undergrad and grad) in a place that had only one temperature (hot), one description (brown) and one actual smell (dusty). So I find myself often drawing upon what I find fascinating and unknown to me. I draw a lot of images from the beach, the sea, stars and outer space because I find these places beautiful. It's like how oil skimming a rain puddle is a beautiful image juxtaposed against something not seen as such. I have to find something inspiring to write about and apply it to the universality of poetry--otherwise, a lot more of my work would be mindless self indulgent complaining and whining. I don't really know why I decide which images or metaphors to use. I just know that I love learning about how stars are formed, how oyster shells are ground up and sold as calcium supplements. I have so much useless knowledge related back to nature and the body, that I have to use it somewhere because I know I'm never going to find a practical use for it all. Not even if I ever make it onto Jeopardy.

At times in your poetry, as in "Breaking Ground," hard consonance, onomatopoeia, and long sentences contribute to a cacophonic, frenetic tone and voice. Other times, as in "The Spirit of Grief," a prose poem, varied sentence length, liquid consonants, and semivowels slow the rhythm. Can you speak to this in terms of the decisions you make during your writing process?

This answer is going to make me sound a little schizophrenic, but I believe in each poem having a voice or speaker. My long term project is a collection that works as a novel in verse with different characters, points of view and voices, and the poems are how the reader interacts with the character. I guess the easiest way of applying it would be like a play or a series of monologues. In my work, I also try to envision an embedded narrative. In the example of "Breaking Ground," when I work in my garden, it's not actual gardening, mostly it's weeding and hacking away at soil clumps. I tried to get this sort of experience down onto the page with the diction and line breaks. As for "Spirit of Grief" part of the work is done through the form, but also there's something mysterious and slow about spirits (not ghosts, since again, it all comes down to word choice). I guess when I come up with an idea to write about, I try to mimic the feeling to evoke a more visceral response.

Strong emotions lie at the root of each of these poems. Do you begin each poem with an emotion in mind, or does the emotion stem from a different starting point? How do you craft your poems to have such strong emotions?

I believe that since poems should evoke an emotion or feeling, I try to craft them to do just that. I do also think that I am an overly emotional & irrational person; so when the robot invasion comes, I won't be able to pass as one of the soon to be overlords. But joking aside, I think that the emotions stem from my placement of the poem. Where does this poem go (in terms of my long term project) and what is the speaker feeling? I honestly believe that all people are motivated by one singular emotion most of the time, so whether it be grief, anxiety, guilt, joy, a moment of respite or peace. And this is where being an emotional (and slightly empathic) person comes to play because I will draw upon that and use that feeling to help me choose which words fit most appropriately when writing. Editing helps fine tune that. I guess this is why for a huge chunk of my grad school career, I was a bit melancholy because I was working on the grief section of my project a little too much....