Associate Editor Lily Davenport: Carolene Kurien’s poem begins with a moment of solidarity and sly, understated humor, and opens unexpectedly into an examination of misogyny’s deep-rooted personal consequences. Its final moment arrives as at once a light touch and a darkly resonant callback to the poem’s core.

Listen to Kurien read the poem:

The Musculature of Restraint

Text:

She came to the serial watch party dressed as Tony the Tiger. Like a satirical situation of sorts she explains solemnly on the front stoop, having been asked to leave the party. I pat her oranged, matted back, offer to watch any season of Fargo except the fifth. When I think of that man, what he did, I am intent on the induction of loss. Of memory. Of time. Of he was very beautiful, you have to understand. At the deli I ask for a cure for the molassedness in my chest and receive a lecture on the proper semantics of pain. I come back the next day and throw every curl sloughing itself off my head on the butcher scale. Semanticize this. To think of men, what they’ve done, is to be afraid of moving your lips but incapable of silencing your body. Clumps of hair on your desk and piano. Bile in your throat like standing water. I’m not a very good person; I just make a lot of the right sounds with my mouth. He said this at the billiards club, if it matters.

Carolene Kurien is a Malayali American poet from South Florida. A MacDowell Fellow and Tin House alum, she holds an MFA from the University of Miami. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Sixth Finch, Salt Hill, Bennington Review, BOOTH, Diode, and elsewhere. Learn more at carolenekurien.com.

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