A Forcerant: My Descent Into Muskmelon/Muskrat Madness

Our favorite game is Muskmelon or Muskrat.

Think of anything in the world, then ask:

Is it closer to a muskmelon, or a muskrat?

                    ––Henry Goldkamp, “Forcemeat,” Mid-American Review, issue 42.1

That’s it. That’s the game that “Forcemeat” is built around. Before adapting this poem into a full-blown board game, I liked it just fine. Even while playing it, I had no idea how drastically this remix would change my experience with the poem. Expanding on it gave me the vocabulary to articulate facets of my identity which I assumed would go unexplained to my family for the rest of my life.

“Forcemeat” was about––as I initially read it––a normalizing system of logic trying to draw sense out of personal and global catastrophe. (Don’t get me wrong, I promise it’s also a lot of fun.) At points, there’s an absurdist disconnect to the dialogue between the two speakers that reminded me of Waiting for Godot (which is to say I’ve read only one piece of absurdist literature.) It wasn’t my favorite in Issue 42.1, (that would be “Bone Town” by Angie Macri,) but it was the favorite of our hard-working (one could say overworked) Poetry Editor. As a Christmas gift for them, I turned the poem into a structured board game for the MAR staff to play.

Obviously, one need only read the opening three lines of the poem to be able to play informally in pairs. It’s as simple as “I Spy” and makes an even better road trip game. When playing in this format, though, one’s decisions go unanalyzed. Each player independently develops their own concept of the melon/rat binary using the fodder their partner supplies. This mimics what we see between the two speakers of “Forcemeat,” who have already established their own codes which (especially if you haven’t been thinking about it for six goddamn months) seem alien and inaccessible.

Our adaptation requires much more intentional analysis––or at least prediction. Players advance on the game board by voting in the majority on increasingly less and less melon/rat-like concepts, within a matter of 5 seconds. The first player to reach the end of the board wins. (Check out the companion post for the full rules and PDFs for the game.) We surprised the 30-strong MAR staff by bringing it to a meeting at the end of last semester.

I had no idea that making the game a communal affair would make it feel so … vulnerable? As our Poetry Editor puts it, voting publicly feels like “baring your soul” ––despite the silliness. Not only do you flounder to quickly draw out increasingly unsubstantiated connections between the given concept and a rat or melon, but it is now something you can get “right” or “wrong.” Your mind is on full display with each vote.

At least, it felt that way. When players landed on red “debate” squares and were forced to justify the melocity or ratitude of that round’s concept, one found that their “allies” share their verdict for completely different reasons. (Example: My friend and I agreed that “butterfly” is a muskmelon. While I thought of the sugary nectar butterflies collect, though, they connected the melon’s rind to the butterfly’s cocoon.) Even one’s opponents used their same reasoning to draw the opposite conclusions. (Example: I thought “stiletto” was a muskrat due to the muskrat’s sharp teeth, but the Poetry Editor thought about the shoe’s sharp heel piercing a melon.) The rules players developed for both categories only grew more abstracted from the physical reality of fruit and Rodentia as we progressed. A huge part of the game (if you played to win) was predicting where those rules were leading your colleagues, but when it was time for a debate, everyone was reminded of how wildly different their perceptions were from everyone else’s. A sense of isolation settled on the room as each player realized that they were the only one correctly interpreting the energies of melons and rats.

This sensation of simultaneous exposure and disconnect enhanced the absurdist feeling I got from the original poem. It drew my attention to the places where the speakers of “Forcemeat” miscommunicate and disagree––it put more emphasis on the end, where the roadkill incident drives a wedge between them. While playing––and now, while reading––I felt a push and pull of intimacy and isolation. It echoes what it’s like to share an experience with someone and find that you had wildly different perceptions of it. I didn’t see any of this in the poem before the board game.

This brings me to my main reason for being obsessed with the “Forcemeat” cinematic universe.

Imagine living in a world where everything is viewed through the lens of this binary: muskmelons versus muskrats. This binary has a largely unspoken ruleset that eludes you, although it seems that everyone around you parsed it quickly and easily. Yet as you discuss this with others, their interpretations prove to be inconsistent with those of your other peers and even internallyinconsistent. Despite this, everything––even YOU––can be cleanly categorized this way. You are deemed muskmelon. Your given name indicates this. On your birthday, you receive muskmelon gifts. You’re expected to wear muskmelon clothes, watch muskmelon shows, pursue muskmelon interests. Every single person who sees you looks at your body to judge: muskmelon or muskrat? They treat you, speak to you differently based on that judgment. Even if you’re hard to sort. Especially if you’re hard to sort.

You feel utterly alienated by this system. The emphasis put on it and the rules that govern it feel absurd, pointless, and limiting. It’s not even that you resent melon life or yearn for rat life. You just want your life to be a muskmelon and muskrat buffet. You don’t want to choose based on that arbitrary status, but rather your own preferences. But alas, when a human is born, the first words it hears are “it’s a melon!” or “it’s a rat!” Whichever they are judged as defines the rest of their life. 

…

So, the plot twist here is that I feel much more like a muskrat on the melon/rat binary than I do like either a man or a woman on the gender binary.

Playing “Forcemeat” deeply spoke to me as a nonbinary person, particularly as a nonbinary person on the autism spectrum. As a kid, social norms didn’t (and still don’t) come easy to me, including the gender ones. (Examples: Women wear makeup. Men don’t cry. Women should be skinny, men muscular. What the hell are you talking about?!) Some will offer evolutionary explanations for such classifications, but I would counter that the way our pre-civilization ancestors survived shouldn’t have such a strong bearing on how we live today. Furthermore, our understanding of our evolutionary past keeps evolving (such as with the men = hunter, women = gatherer myth.) Some cite biochemical reasons for their way of sorting, but in many cases, even when they are scientifically sound, one could argue with similar reasons for the inverse expectations. (If testosterone grants men social leniency to be more expressive of frustration and anger, why does menstruation not call for a similar grace?) The foundation of many of these hyperspecific categorizations are a stretch, much like the reasoning one comes up with when playing “Forcemeat”. They latch onto something like assumptions based on shaky conclusions drawn from a cultural myth of a bygone era, which itself was a departure from the previous assumption of blah blah blah blah blah.

This is all to say that engaging with this silly poem not only resonated with my experience but helped me put into words what makes me so averse, both personally and intellectually, to the gender binary.

Now everyone else, stop reading for a bit. This next part is just for my mom.

––

Hi, Mom!

I was sort of planning on this being an open secret for the rest of my life. Had Outlook not added my email signature––with my changed name and pronouns––to that message I sent you a while ago, I was going to try keeping it a closed secret. Well, as closed as I could keep it after sharing very vocally with my middle school classmates my hope that puberty would grant me hairy arms and a beard.

I’ve been so scared about trying to explain this to any of my family, not because I’m scared of being disowned––I know your love is unconditional––but because I freeze when I even try to think of how I would articulate what it means to consider oneself “nonbinary” to you. I hate arguing and I hate conflict, even in the form of the most sophisticated and gentlemanly debate. I would shatter into a million pieces if any of you responded by starting with so much as the word “But.” That’s caused me to let a gap grow between us. But now, analyzing this poem has given me the words to explain it, and I’m no longer afraid of that conversation.

Maybe you’re thinking, why not live with the “muskmelon” label and do whatever I feel like anyways? You yourself were a tomboy (or tomrat, if we’re speaking metaphorically.) In some ways you grew up to be a thomaswoman. In fact, my own upbringing didn’t pigeonhole me into a strict definition of womanhood as readers might assume, given the little “Twilight Zone” episode they just read. What makes me so sure I haven’t been a muskrattish muskmelon, or a boyish girl, or a masculine woman? 

On a practical, everyday level, I feel so much more comfortable with myself outside the labels of female/male, labels which feel as irrelevant to how I carry myself as the labels muskmelon/muskrat do to most people on earth. Being referred to with she/her pronouns felt like wearing a really uncomfortable sweater that irritates my skin, a fashion choice which is liable to make me 54% grumpier on any given day. I physically felt better when I came out to my friends and colleagues as Jamie Manias, when I wasn’t referred to as a muskmelon all the fuckin’ time, when people knew that they’d likely misinterpret me if they looked at me through the paradigm of man- or womanhood.

On a touchy-feely “who am I” level, “melon” or “woman” being the core descriptor of me as a person––the noun onto which every other aspect of myself is an adjective piled on––does not feel accurate at all. To be considered a masculine woman is still to be considered, grammatically and socially, a woman above anything else. More than that, it is to be considered a woman who is bad at being a woman, according to the rules of the mutually exclusive binary. Like being a cold pot of coffee or a shy public speaker.

Maybe you’re thinking that the way people see me won’t be affected at all by my coming out, that they’ll always see me as a woman. That it’s practically impossible for anyone to mentally accept someone as “in-between” or “neither.” That this binary––even if it is as silly as a binary of melons and rats––can’t really be set aside by anyone. That could be true, especially of me. (It’s hard to divorce a pronoun like “she” from a rack like mine.) But even if the only thing that’s changed is the way people refer to me, that still makes me feel more at home in my own skin. That was a rare feeling for me before realizing this about myself.

Anyways, give Morty and Bella lots of pets for me. Keep the pool table ready, I’ll see you over Spring Break.

With much love,

Jamie Manias.

––

…

Anyways.

I often fear that I neglect my duty to this burning, burning world by wasting my time and talent on writing poetry. 

But before playing “Forcemeat,” I was planning on never having this conversation.

I was terrified.

I thought I could never clearly communicate my internal experience to anyone not already well-versed in gender-ology. 

Maybe I can’t. Maybe I can’t communicate it to anyone. But that’s not the point. The point is that even if nobody understands me any better, even if the writer of “Forcemeat” is appalled by my interpretation (hi Henry!), even if I’m banished from the academy for my mad science of grafting a board game to a living poem, no matter what, I found a way to explain myself to myself here. And if a poem can give that to someone, maybe I’m not wasting my time as a poet.

––Jamie Manias (they/them), Mid-American Review

On Sara Moore Wagner’s Swan Wife

Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner. San Diego, CA: Cider Press Review, 2022. 88 pages. $18.95. Paper.

A book of poetry that simultaneously frightens and beguiles is a rare treasure; and Swan Wife, by Sara Moore Wagner, does precisely that. These original poems are often startling in their fearlessness and beauty. Each piece resonates with the astounding strangeness of everyday life and creates shifting worlds that are both fairytale and madness. The sheer weirdness of metaphor drew me in immediately, and Wagner reveals herself as an expert craftsman of the surreal image, the internal metaphor, and the spellbinding complexities of impulse, intimacy, and desire. 

Sara Moore Wagner seems to have a secret window into perception and experience, and in Swan Wife, she unravels what she sees. The poems are organic, physical, archetypal, and supernatural. The voice is startlingly honest and precise. Swan Wife examines wildness caught; but only for an instant—as a sparrow, a tensile wing, or an unsettling dream. Wagner pulls apart how we are trapped by domesticity, intimacy, gender roles, relationships, and our bodies.  

The book is built around the traditional heroic narrative structure developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Swan Wife, Notes.) The poems build themselves on metaphor borrowed from fairytale and myth to explore realms of the body and the psyche of the “housewife”, Swan Wife, or woman who is half wild creature and half tethered by pacts of domesticity. The result is a world fraught with surreality; a continuous pushing and pulling of the self and the psyche as the speaker navigates the realms of womanhood, motherhood, marriage, beauty, permeability of the self, and autonomy.

The opening poem, “Licentious,” begins “When spring comes, I go naked to the lake / near the hospital where I was born” and captures a highly physical sense of intimate and psychic tension. The speaker commands “Give me a husband who’s never seen the glint / of my skin, how it looks like a knife” and conjures the ambivalent strangeness of the possum, “long-nosed, a jawful of teeth” to create a sense of being half-hidden, “playing dead” with a “pouch full/ of babies, thick as disease.” It’s a startling, visceral vision of self-mythos and quiet power. 

In “Like I Won’t Take Something from You,” the speaker intimates the strange fluidity of familial love and romantic love, the ways her body resembles and become the landscape she inhabits, her “golden hair” “like new hay / rolled into tiny suns.” The poems delve into the intricacies of long love, troubled girldom, and childhood blurring into adulthood. The woman as swan emerges in “Ball and Chain,” where the speaker’s partner calls her “swan” when she touches a dirty lake where no one will swim; he observes “you’ll go where you want,” and the speaker allows herself the metaphysical embrace, and stops herself from running. 

In addition to themes of duplicity and dislocation, the poems also explore physical vulnerability, permeability, rot, disease, and birth. There is a fascinating compartmentalization and animism of the body as separate vectors, as in the gorgeous motherhood poems “Venus Complex,” “Nervous Condition,” “Postpartum II,” and “Reward.” These subdued yet powerful pieces exemplify the mysterious, ambivalent spirit of poems so rooted in the body. 

Swan Wife is also lyrical and musical, and in “Circe Complex” Wagner draws on her singular command of sound and diction to create an elemental incantation reminiscent in spirit and sound to Glück, Plath, and Sexton. Similarly powerful are “A Woman Like That is Not Ashamed to Die,” which envisions a terrifying landscape of motherhood and wifehood and “Getting My Body Back,” which invokes Perrault’s Donkey Skin to examine self-image, grief, and the strangeness of personal physical and mental metamorphosis:

       I try on each skin like a dress,

       each one lovelier than the next—stables

       in the heart open. They’re running.

The poems in this book will surprise you. In craft and in voice, they are original, relentless, and vulnerable. Sara Moore Wagner is a poet who sees the world through her own strange prism, and in Swan Wife, the reader is offered a glimpse into worlds both alluring and frightening—yet tempered with Wagner’s hyper-perception, sensitivity, and deep instinct. 

––Mary Robles, Mid-American Review  

Featured Writer: George Looney + Interview

On Thursday February 1st at 7:30pm, Poet and writer George Looney will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

George Looney has nourished a decades long career as a successful writer, editor, and educator; his career has produced several collections of award-winning work: including, 13 collections of poetry and 4 collections of prose.  

Looney’s work has been published in countless literary journals and anthologies such as American Writers Review and Mid-American Review in 2023 with his book review, Review of Wendell Mayo’s Twice-Born World: Stories of Lithuania and many, many more esteemed publications. His new short story collection The Visibility of Things Long Submerged was published by BOA Editions, LTD in 2023.

George Looney currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at Penn State Erie where he also serves as the Editor of the literary journal, Lake Effect. Looney founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie. For eight years, Looney served as Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review after receiving his M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University; Looney now serves as the Translations Editor for Mid-American Review. We are incredibly lucky to have Looney back in Bowling Green this week; he will be reading from both his new book of stories, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged (BOA Editions) and his new collection of poetry, The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible (Cider Press Review).

To find out more information, visit George Looney here:

https://georgelooney.org/

Assistant Editor Elly Salah conducted the following interview with George Looney via email.

Elly Salah: You’ve mentioned that some of the places you write about in your fiction are real places. How do you decide what to fictionalize when drawing from real memories? 

George Looney: None of the places in The Visibility of Things Long Submerged are actual places from my memory, places I have been and am remembering. But some of the places, like Rome, GA and Subligna, GA are real places that I had to use for various reasons. For instance, I needed a small town near the Chattahoochee National Park, as that National Park is a good place to find scarlet snakes, which was important for the story. I did quite a bit of research for both of these towns, because I wanted to have a sense of the places to fit the story to the place and to use the place to create the story. Research is always a two-lane highway in the creative process. 

ES: In The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, your characters go through journeys where they question the role of faith in their lives. Would you mind sharing a little bit about how these character’s conflicts come to be: Does a character’s struggle come before the other elements of a narrative or does the narrative somehow shape the character’s struggle?

GL: In my estimation, plot is the least important element of fiction. Plot is just “this happens then this happens then this happens, etc.” The real question is, So what? And that comes from the interactions within and between characters. Putting characters in a setting and establishing conflict—or at least tension—is for me the genesis of story. 

ES: How do you see poetry and prose influencing the ways in which we interact and create spaces of faith? 

GL: Religion and faith are of course not the same thing. Art—all art, not just literature—no matter how nihilistic, has faith at its core. To make art is a positive act; it implies a faith in there being someone to “read” it, to experience it, to share the experience of it. 

ES: Could you discuss a little bit about what it’s been like serving as an editor in the literary world and also a successful writer? Do those two “roles” ever conflict? 

GL: I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to be an editor, first with Mid-American Review for many years and now with Lake Effect for many years. To get to participate in the shaping of contemporary poetry and prose—which is what literary journals do—is an honor. Editors say, this deserves to be read, this deserves an audience, this deserves to last. As for any conflict between being an editor and being a writer, the only conflict is the struggle for time. Reading the work of other writers—both good and bad—informs constantly my own skills as a writer. The two roles complement one another more than they conflict. 

ES: What was it like to create the Bachelor’s of Fine Arts program at Penn State Erie? What motivated you to start the program?

GL: I was participating in one of those “retreats” to formulate a five-year plan for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie, and I, sort of jokingly, suggested we should start a BFA in Creative Writing program. I had already revamped the BFA at BGSU before I left there to take a tenure-track position here (something I was never going to get at BGSU due to the attitudes of a particular Dean), and since we already had a well-funded reading series and a track in the English BA for creative writing, it seemed like a logical possibility. Then it turned out that the Chancellor loved the idea (thinking it would bring more females to a college dominated by males), and so I then had to spend a lot of time and energy creating the program, which I based on the work I had done at BGSU but trying to improve upon what I had done at BGSU. 

ES: Seeing as you are accomplished in multiple genres, would you mind sharing how your process might change when approaching a collection of prose versus a collection of poetry?

GL: The process doesn’t change, exactly. The focus is perhaps different. I agree with Ezra Pound, who argued that good poetry must be at least as well-written as good prose. The sentence is the basis of all good writing. Understanding how sentences function is essential in both poetry and prose. The only difference is in poetry you also have the line, which allows you to manipulate the sentence in an additional way. This does not include prose poetry, of course. But I realize you asked about producing collections of poetry or prose. Every book—whether prose or poetry—determines how it comes to be. The Visibility of Things Long Submerged started from one story—the first in the book—which was written as the result of a challenge like that which led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. There were three of us—myself and two graduate fiction writers—sitting in a bar on Main Street drinking and waiting for a pool table to open up, and I said, in response to something, “Jesus is a shell game,” and one of the other two said someone should write a story with that title, so we all agreed to write such a story, and I was the only one who apparently was sober enough to remember. That was the original title of “What Gives Us Voice.” The editor of New England Review requested the title change. All the other stories came out of the feeling that the characters in that story had more to do, more to say, more to discover, more to reveal. 

ES: As an expert in both poetry and prose, could you share with us a bit more about your process? This week you’ll be reading to us from both your collections of poetry and prose. Do you have any preference when it comes to reading your work? 

GL: I have no preference between giving readings of my fiction or my poetry. But I should admit, even though I’ve published a novel, a novella, and two story collections, I consider myself a poet who has written some fiction. I love reading good fiction as much as I love reading good poetry, and I have fiction writers I feel as passionately about as I feel about my favorite poets. 

ES: Reflecting on your time as an educator of creative writing, what is the single most important thing a creative writing student can take away from a course with you?

GL: A passionate love for language. And the recognition that—as Whitman declared about American poetry—the challenge is to create/discover language to express the inexpressible. To strive for anything less is to cheat yourself and, more importantly, to cheat the art of literature. 

ES: Last question, what was your favorite place to hangout or thing to do when you attended Bowling Green State University for your MFA?

GL: There are several places and things I did, much with my best friend of 35 years who sadly died 5 years ago, Douglas Smith. Playing pool and ping pong at Howards, especially after workshop nights. Playing racketball at 2 or 3 in the morning after writing in Hanna Hall for hours in a court that used to be under the stadium and was always open, and then going to Frisch’s for breakfast, and then going home to sleep. There are others, but I’ll stop there.

***

––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review

Why We Chose It: “Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk

“Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk was selected for publication by Mid-American Review poetry staff in Volume XLII, Number 1.

When I read this poem, I can’t help but think of those little workshops that Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other home improvement retailers held back in the day. The ones kids would be dragged to by their parents on Saturday mornings. They’d be handed planks of wood, hammers, nails, screws, and other tools they had no clue how to use. An aproned employee wearing a ball cap would walk everyone through how to build whatever was on the agenda for the day. Mothers, fathers, older siblings would do their best to reign in their little builders, trying to guide their soft hands, hoping they could complete the project, bring it home to show off to the rest of the family. 

Sometimes they’d build birdhouses. 

And while they never turned out quite as expected, there was an element of unique beauty to each of the misaligned walls, the splotchy paint, the circular hole that wasn’t exactly quite a circle, but worked all the same. 

I like to think some of those birdhouses became homes to our little, winged companions. 

In “Do Not Hold the Birds,” Kucharczyk captures the beauty of creation, the synergy within the shared melody we have the opportunity to experience with nature. The poem acts as a guide for how to live in concourse with these earthly elements we’re rather lucky to be in conversation with.

The poem opens with the lines: “Do not hold the birds, do not make / little homes of your hands, do not ache / into a man. He will be silent”

There’s something so gripping and enticing about the beginning of this poem. If we are not to hold the birds, then what are we to do? Kucharczyk responds to this question with ultimate grace and flowing language that tingles our poetic taste buds like a cup of coffee on an April morning out on the back porch—the air buzzing with birdsong and other nice things. 

What’s most impressive about this piece is its subtle ability to subvert our expectations near the conclusion. We finally learn what we are to do with our hands, with the birds, and with our lives––and we are better off because of it. 

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review  

Why We Chose It: “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion” by Alyse Knorr

Mid-American Review poetry staff selected “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion” by Alyse Knorr for publication in Volume 42.1 

In MAR, we gravitate toward poems that create a peculiar and uncanny feeling in the readers. Knorr’s poem was selected for its overall strength, particularly the lyrical meter and cadence. The poem successfully takes on the mystical world of werewolves and holds so much weight in the world being created. According to Managing Editor Mary Simmons, “It’s a short poem, but it holds so much weight.” In poetry, editors look for poems that we cannot get out of our heads. Knorr evokes the unshakableness we aim to capture in MAR. Knorr’s poem elicits the feeling of reading a ghost story in late October under the covers with a flashlight. After reading “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion,” readers are left to contemplate painful bones in a new place where the poet asks, “Will you choose to accept, or will you choose to allow? / The bones will hurt most, and they will not be speedy.” 

“I love that this is a werewolf poem that is so lyrical and subtle. I’m a huge fan of folklore and myth, and the way Knorr weaves that in with haunting imagery and beautiful cadence is particularly enchanting. My favorite thing about this poem is how easy it is to get lost in.” ––Mary Simmons, Managing Editor 2023-2024

“The moment I knew I would fight for this poem was the line ‘You’ve never had enough / legs or teeth.’ Along with the title, I love how Knorr works with the ideas of transitions, the feeling of never having enough (never being enough), journeys, and the inevitable. The line coming after, ‘The less you want to hurt someone, the more likely you will,’ feels like a connection of all those ideas: the wanting to change, the inevitability, the feeling of never being enough (or not quite right). I think this section is so well crafted and thought out. I also love the question of accepting versus allowing; the subtlety in those words, questioning whether actually have agency or just let things happen. The full moon, the wolves, the transitions, the wanting, the allowing. So good.” ––Michael Beard, Managing Editor 2022-2023 

––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review