Cindy King, whose poem “Capacitor (Be Mine)” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, speaks to the social image of the widow and how poetry might serve as a site of its interrogation.

Widows, widowers, those who’ve lost their partners—they exist in the borderlands, the margins: seen and unseen, heard but not, both dead and very much alive. “Capacitor (Be Mine)” was born of this place—on the edge, at the fringe, between sanity and madness, coherence and chaos. In a larger sense, the poem attempts to grapple with and potentially subvert stereotypes and received ideas about widowhood, and by extension sexuality and romantic love. By calling attention to these misconceptions through the appropriation of their accompanying clichés and tropes, I wish to continue exploring the consequences of being removed—sometimes suddenly, violently—from the context of what is for most of us a major part of our identity: our life partners, in both the literal and figurative sense, our home.

In probing the socially-constructed concept of “widow” as it is shaped and reinforced in the popular imagination through mainstream media, of particular interest to me is the trope of husbandless women: sexually starved, and as a consequence, presumably licentious, undoubtedly perverse. Despite some movement towards the acceptance of expressions of women’s sexual appetites, there remains a degree of taboo, particularly as it applies to those who have lost their partners. Short of throwing themselves on the proverbial funeral pyre, what constitutes acceptable behavior for widowed women involves eternal faithfulness, loyalty, and consequently, lifelong celibacy. To carry the black parasol, to forever wear the shawl, the expectation is to quietly, solitarily settle into tragedy, to take on “widow” as one’s new mantle. Real or imagined, to whatever extent, there exists a stigma surrounding widows’ outward expression of happiness or pleasure—particularly as it comes from remarriage, dating, or sexual encounter. 

The poem’s rapid shifts and its frequent lack of smooth transition reflect a particular viewpoint, the way those who have lost must often process memory and experience—through the selective and severed thinking required to suppress triggering landmines. Survival necessitates living in the moment, that liminal space without past or future. It is in this space that the poem alludes to the performance of romantic relationships on social media platforms, performances that include not only high points, but also the low. With the shift to “workers at fulfillment centers,” I hope to reveal how our preoccupation with romance and the pursuit of romantic relationships serves to obfuscate things such as the exploitation of human capital. The beginning of the poem’s final stanza serves as a comment on how often the value of simply being in a relationship supersedes the quality of the relationship itself. Here the poem also confronts the social expectation and pressure to be “coupled” in our culture, exposing how ironically it leads to alienation from others—and ultimately ourselves. 

I engage with received language at various points in the poem, and particularly with those words we often encounter at the end of fairytales—especially those that end in marriage: “…and they lived happily ever after.” These words, as they are referenced in the penultimate stanza and echoed as the poem’s last lines, represent a breakdown of this trope, an interrogation and dismantling of the construct. That from a young age we are steeped and situated in this language serves to inform and solidify our expectations of romantic love and relationships as adults. Again, the last lines appropriate the “love mythology” of our childhood in the image of Cupid’s arrow, but here it appears in our own hands. While we have agency to aim and throw it (however desperately, without a bow) at our potential lover, all attempts are futile. That in fact, the prospect of finding—or retaining—the proverbial “soulmate” for an imagined ever after constitutes nothing more than an illusion. 

Cindy King’s most recent publications include poems in The Sun, Callaloo, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, African American Review, American Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. You can hear her online on American Weekend, a production of National Public Radio, at weekendamerica.publicradio.org, rhinopoetry.org, and at cortlandreview.com. Her work has also been chosen by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to appear on NPR’s The Slowdown https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2020/05/08/379-february-my-love-is-in-another-state.Her book-length collection of poems, Zoonotic, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions. Her chapbook, Easy Street, was released by Dancing Girl Press in March 2021.

 

Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at DSU and faculty advisor of The Southern Quill. She also enjoys serving on the artistic board for the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, California and screen scripts for their Living Room Series.

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