Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to feature Benjamin S. Grossberg’s poem “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” as our first featured chapbook poem of Issue 7: Winter 2025. You can find more poetry in their chapbook, As Are Right Fit, now available from Small Harbor Publishing.
The Poem as an Act of Betrayal
Who was she, that woman who died, who suffered
brutally and died? The pathetic lying-in-bed
woman who stole your voice with her wind-torn
vocal cords and croaked out my name? That woman
didn’t eat or wash herself, couldn’t be bothered to get
up or well or a grip. She trailed plastic cords,
tangles of them, had an open tube that ran across
her body, directly into her chest, had a tube under
her gown and more than half the time one
thick as a garden hose down her throat. That woman’s
fists were claws when in delirium she tried
to thrust her way out of bed; nail pressure
bit into the flesh of my palm as I coaxed her
down. She smelled in a way you’d never smell
and had no taste for fine things. She wasn’t a Fendi-
from-the-loose-crook-of-her-elbow swinger, didn’t
know Burberry from blueberry, and no one
brushed her teeth. Let me tell you a story
about that woman: I read her four chapters
of Pride and Prejudice, and she didn’t smile once.
She didn’t, as you’d have done, put a hand
to her chest and bat her eyes, didn’t repeat
Mr. Darcy Mr. Darcy Mr. Darcy with breathy roundness,
the bellying out of a nine-month pregnancy, didn’t
find even the prospect of a ball delicious.
You’d have had no use for that woman.
You’d have sat with me on the edge of chairs
the nurses brought in, eating wedges of the cake-
size chocolate chip muffin that woman wouldn’t touch.
You’d have sat there for half hour or whatever
was minimally polite, then zipped up your puffy down
jacket and swung your Fendi, barely waiting till we were
through the doorframe to shake your head, make
a dismissive gesture, and whisper If we hurry we
can still make Bingo. Let me tell you another story:
once, in Gatwick, a man passed us, old man,
thin, wispy-headed, bent, and you put your long-
nailed fingers on my forearm and said That man is about
to die. I barely had time to look back before we passed:
people and their luggage rushing along, but not
this man, slow, painfully slow. We weren’t ten feet
beyond him when we heard his bark and collapse.
His face, you said then, gray as cardboard. You’d seen it
before, in your nursing days. That woman, the one
lying in bed, was her face gray, too? I bet I could
call you—any time I wanted, right now—and ask.
I bet you’d pick up. You’d put down your paperback,
take a schlook of some clear liquid that could strip
varnish, and tell me more about what you saw
on the nursing floor. Gray, you’d say, gray as lint,
as you rummage through your Fendi for a cigarette.
(This poem was first published by Asheville Poetry Review. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.)
About the Poem
Sometimes when a person dies, we ask the rhetorical question, “Who were they?” as a way to launch into a discussion of their essential nature, their goals, values, and beliefs.
“The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” asks that question literally, seeing the woman dying in bed as someone other than my mother, as cancer robbed my mother of so much of who she was—her sense of style, her impatience, her irreverence, her playfulness. I think of this inquiry as a “an act of betrayal” because it denies a significant part of her experience. Consider how powerful an act of witnessing can be. How it validates and affirms. This poem is built on just the opposite gesture, a refusal to witness my mother’s dying as a thing happening to her: “I bet I could / call you—any time I wanted, right now…. / I bet you’d pick up.”
My hope is that a reader will feel this refusal as arising not from weakness—or not only from weakness—but also as a response to grief.
Author Bio
Originally from Far Rockaway, New York, Benjamin S. Grossberg was educated at Rutgers and the University of Houston. From 2000 to 2008, he worked at Antioch College in Ohio, where he purchased a small farm and planted the Granny Smith orchard for which his second book was named. He is currently Director of Creative Writing and a Professor of English at the University of Hartford, in Hartford, Connecticut.
Ben’s books of poetry include My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), winner of the Connecticut Book Award and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year; Space Traveler (University of Tampa, 2014); Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007), winner of the Snyder Prize. He has also published two chapbooks, An Elegy (Jacar Press, 2016) and The Auctioneer Bangs his Gavel (Kent State University Press, 2006). A new chapbook is forthcoming from Small Harbor Press late in 2024. He co-edited an anthology, The Poetry of Capital (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), which curates poems about the economic pressures of our moment. And he wrote the novel, The Spring before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), selected by Percival Everett for the 2023 AWP Award Series James Alan McPherson Prize.
From As Are Right Fit
Grossberg’s As Are Right Fit takes on the complex, messy work of trying to make sense of a parent’s life on the occasion of her passing. What moments were pivotal? How did her struggles, obsessions, and ambitions play out? And what legacy she has left for those who loved her? This collection opens with the poet’s mother dying of cancer, but ranges widely: to her sixteenth birthday as she holds out her hand to admire a new charm bracelet; to decades of motherhood and work; to late middle age, swirling ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka—and finally to her as a ghost, “dragging the gray lace of itself /across hardwood floors.” With wit, invention, and rich detail, these poems remind us that grieving is also a quest for understanding, and that it involves celebrating the joy, humor, and particularity that make each of us, in the hearts of those who love us, indelible.
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.