Review of Maria Masington’s Mouth Like a Sailor
The cover of Maria Masington’s new book, “Mouth Like a Sailor,” hints at the poems beneath. In the vintage image, a woman in a sailor uniform casts a knowing look over her shoulder as a cigarette hangs from her lips. She is a study in contradiction: a woman in man’s garb, innocent but knowing, beguiling but bold.
Like that woman, Masington seems unafraid—to write about the hard stuff, the stuff that matters, the stuff that makes you want to look away. In 56 pages, this wide-ranging collection covers topics from addiction to aging, from family relationships to 9/11, always with a sensitive and masterful hand.
The book’s opening poem, “Snow White Walks Home from AA,” spins the well-known fairy tale on its head, referring to “the lie of ‘Happily Ever After.’” The idealized meets and mingles with gritty, imperfect reality.
She tries to remember their names, the Seven. She
knew them before the Fall. Happy, Doc, Bashful,
Sneezy, Restless, Irritable, and Discontented.
Paranoia and resentment penetrate this fairy tale-ish scene, producing a poem that is at once unexpected and freshly sacrilegious.
A similar juxtaposition of innocent and sinister takes place in “Clues.” Masington mixes the harmlessness of the game “Clue” with the suggestion of something far more disturbing.
It may have been Colonel Mustard…
or her weird uncle,
or one of her brothers.
She continues to drop hints, suggesting the “it” might have been with the pipe or candlestick of the game, “or an adult body, / or a Coke bottle.” Likewise, it might have taken place in the billiard room, “Or in the family camper, / or her own canopy bed.” The narrator, meanwhile, had only “foggy memories of / things she’d always known.”
I don’t know when a poem has produced in me as visceral a reaction as “Clues.” I squirmed; I shuddered. I got chills. The power of this piece comes partly from the writer’s restraint, from what she doesn’t say but instead leaves to the reader’s imagination.
The theme of addiction introduced in “Snow White” re-emerges in “Lullaby.” When, after hosting a party, her parents started fighting, “the girl in the flowered nightgown…found the / answer in the sink.” That answer was the remnants of alcoholic drinks.
The key was drinking just enough to feel safe. It worked
every single time, tucking her into a dream of happily-ever-
after, and the only thing she could count on.
The poet then tells us how the situation concluded—and projects us into the girl’s future: “Soon the parties stopped, and her parents split, but / it took two more decades for the booze to stop working.”
Addiction resurfaces in “Storm Windows,” in which a (presumably adult) child becomes “trapped between pains of / addiction and self-loathing…demon trapped within, / keeping him slave to the needle.” The addict’s mother is left praying for a pulse.
This is one of several poems about the narrator’s relationships with her children. In “Carnival Gold Fish Boy,” the narrator/mother says,
I was unprepared for a toddler correcting
my observation that the “fluffy” cloud,
was actually cumulus,
who read A Wrinkle in Time
in kindergarten and could do calculus
before he could ride a bike.
When she gave her precocious son a circus-themed box of animal crackers,
he stared at me blankly and asked,
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
I look down at him, then up to the heavens,
and asked the exact same thing.
Masington also writes about other family relationships. One particularly affecting poem is “My Father Was a Paratrooper in Vietnam,” in which the narrator describes her tough-minded father and the dynamics of her family as she grew up, including:
the only rule in our odd world,
“Bite the bullet, all ways, and always.”
No crying allowed.
As an adult, this narrator faces the prospect of telling her parents she is ill, knowing that even the telling goes against the family code, that “True alpha females put the pack first, / and slink off into the woods, to die alone.”
Masington writes with tenderness and sensitivity of what happens to bodies—and relationships—over time. In “Terrain,” for example, “she unrolls her body like a / brittle, ancient map” that is scarred by surgeries and time. Nonetheless, at the poem’s conclusion, “she curls herself around him / and whispers welcome home.”
The poet’s sense of humor, which threads itself subtly throughout the collection, surfaces fully in the prose-poem “Aqua Zumba at the YMCA.” The narrator relates that “We are invisible, women of a certain age, between hot and / doddering.” She describes the women’s “cellulite and stretch marks … / sturdy feet, corned and calloused.”
The narrator addresses a young male lifeguard: “I watch you smirk, laughing at the old broads / gyrating to Nicki Minaj.” She concludes:
But let me guarantee you something, Son...
Forty years ago you would have given your right arm to tap
this.
One could argue that this book is to some degree “feminine” in its perspective and sensibility. In addition to poems about the aging female body, some poems involve abortions, and one describes a hysterectomy. Yet I would say the collection is universal in its appeal and scope, and in the human issues at its heart.
The latter part of the book includes poems about AIDS and 9/11. A standout in this section is “Statistics of 9/11,” a gut-punch of a poem whose haunting power made me want to turn away and not look back.
Masington begins the piece with a quote from Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb.”
When you... step into the darkness of the unknown...
one of two things shall happen:
either you will be given something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.
She then describes the actions of the people who, trapped at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when a terrorist-controlled passenger plane crashed into it on September 11, 2001, chose to jump rather than burn to death.
Bodies folded into origami.
No net or parachute,
no 1,500-foot ladders,
just cement and parked cars.
The poem’s conclusion, though understated, lands hard: “The decision to control destiny / when denied wings.”
Fans of the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen will likely recognize the lines, “There is a crack…in everything / That's how the light gets in” (from Cohen’s song “Anthem”). Masington writes of her characters’ challenges and tragedies in a way that lets us appreciate not only their difficulty, but also their shining beauty.
Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs.