Starr Davis is a poet, author, playwright, and professional writer whose work has been featured in multiple literary magazines such as Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Transition Magazine. Her monologues, poetry, and short stories have awarded her literary fellowships such as the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, Slice Literary Conference Fellowship, and the Eckerd College scholarship. She currently lives in the Bronx, where she is working on her debut short story collection. Her poem “Mourning Sex” can be found here. It appears in the Sept/Oct 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Mourning Sex”?
Here is my most transparent answer behind this poem. I was sitting in my apartment in the Bronx, mourning the death of rapper Nipsey Hussle, and not quite understanding this deep desire to randomly call up an ex-boyfriend just to “suppress” the pain. I don’t think people talk about self-medication enough. This is the only form of healing I have ever truly known. It’s old-school. Silent. Addicting. I was ready to react to grief differently, so I wrote this poem in reference to how I would normally handle the situation.
The line “I can’t stop thinking about the Black man who died / The one who was shot in the sun, looking into the sky” feels imbued with new grief every time we reread it. How did you manage to bridge the gap between writing about a persistent, prolonged sense of mourning and also the immediate present?
I think trauma, in the eyes of a survivor, is always seemingly unchanging. Poetry does this thing. No. Good storytelling does this thing, where it transfixes you in the moment without your consent. This moment is real, and by real I mean, this moment where a Black man dies in the sun, is the storefront mural that keeps repainting itself each day in America.
You found a way to tantalize the reader about this romantic encounter, even when the romantic encounter begins to feel like it’s not the crux of this poem (“He asks for my number because he still knows I need something / But we don’t know what that something is just yet”). How do you build this sense of tension into your work–not just romantic tension, but the way storytelling plays out in your poetry?
There is a very delicious transaction occurring here. A man is getting a woman’s phone number. We have been that man or that woman. In those seconds of exchanging personals, there is always, always tension. I did not need to build this. I just needed to say it. This is the complex part of the craft that most people either get or don’t. Our tongues belong to the streets we come from. My poet mentor Keisha-Gaye Anderson once said, “Write in your native tongue. Say things the way you would say them.” James Baldwin said in his interview with Nikki Giovanni, “That is the assignment of an artist: the people who produced him.” How amazing is it that we are all produced in languages and customs that are sometimes the same and sometimes different than others? And we can USE this language as artistic tools in our work. These lines are romantic because this: a man stopping on the street to get my phone number and not telling me why, because we are from the same crooked places and can both equally see the hunger and motive in our eyes, is one of the most romantic gestures I have ever come to know. This is my language. My customs. My world.
Can you share any more about how this poem fits into the themes of your new collection, How the Body Remembers its Old Masters?
This poem is the “welcome mat” to my collection. Grief and pain in the Black community is and has always been, at least to me, fashionable. If someone dies you put them on a T-shirt. If someone hurts you, you cut your hair or buy a new outfit. You go to the club. If someone dies, you listen to their songs and hang posters of them on your wall. You tattoo lyrics, birthdays, scriptures, zodiac signs, or even the faces of the fallen on your body. You almost sign over livelihood to the memories of pain and death. This collection is a reach. It’s themes of grief, sexual trauma, redemption, all pile on top of the other becoming this sweaty treasure box that is bible. How do you get the body to own itself? How do you start to think for yourself? What if, this is your first time owning anything? What are the comforts that have been passed down from old masters (systems, mental illnesses, family, rapists, strangers) that would cause you to crumble if you decide to denounce them?
How has your writing changed since you started out?
When I started writing poetry, seriously in college, I was afraid to not come off as a poet. There was a forced language I was not accustomed to writing that I felt like I had to write. I am sure I am not the first Black poet with an MFA to say the beginning of my career was full of me fearfully dreading the responses that I sounded like a hip-hop rap star. I wanted to sound smart. Brave. I remember, Mary Biddinger—a wonderful poet and my old poetry professor at The University of Akron—encouraging me to be unique. One time, she wrote on one of my poems, “You are a queen of metaphors!” Today, I am still queen of metaphors. Prophesies like this have changed my writing. I am grateful for the professors and mentors who have nurtured me over the years, encouraging me to be fearless—and, most importantly, myself. I am at a place now where I have the vocabulary to say things. It is beautiful to grow in the craft. Reading has matured my thinking and broadened my thinking. Not just reading poetry but reading hard things like nonfiction, essays, and abstracts. Traveling has sculpted the way I use imagery. Heartbreak, homelessness, and grief have all sharpened me in monstrous ways. Leaving Ohio and ending up on twelve-hour Greyhound bus rides through a dark, wooded Pennsylvania, asking myself a thousand questions along the way about my codependent relationship with a state that no longer served my purpose, are the questions that gutted me and sent me into deep intercessions. I have been reinvented, many times. I am now writing from the body of a woman whom I am learning all over, yet again. But isn’t this how it should be?