The One Who Wasn’t Attacked, Goes to Help the One Who Was (5 <span class="italics">Jaws</span> Erasures)

The One Who Wasn’t Attacked, Goes to Help the One Who Was (5 Jaws Erasures)

The town broke

Okay. Say you typed “attack!”
That part of the summer,
those brief weeks, jumped alive.
A boom of carpenters, waitresses.
That summer rolls enough to wreck
the town. The tide
would move. Everyone remained.

Source: Jaws by Peter Benchley; Doubleday, Garden City, NY: 1974. pg. 33–34.

Ellen arrived

Turned in,
took off. Mixing
already in the mirror—
her face her bath herself her teeth.
The bedroom pulled back her eyes,
her eyes as he approached.

Source: Jaws by Peter Benchley; Doubleday, Garden City, NY: 1974. pg. 173.

Brody sensed

The complication of authority
that arrival, the long day.
Find the tooth. Go through
it all in darkness:
come back,
turn home,
clean up.

Source: Jaws by Peter Benchley; Doubleday, Garden City, NY: 1974. pg. 89.

Ellen assumed

A slam-bam waitress.
The table, the the waitress,
the table. The seat as she stood.
The waitress—I hope nobody ever
knows me that well.

Source: Jaws by Peter Benchley; Doubleday, Garden City, NY: 1974. pg. 173.

Brody thought

The town, this trip—
Say          you’re not a pocket.
Say          he reached,
Put it       here.
Said                    good luck.

Source: Jaws by Peter Benchley; Doubleday, Garden City, NY: 1974. pg. 267.

Meghan Phillips is the editor-in-chief for Third Point Press and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in wigleaf, Passages North, and Strange Horizons. You can find more of her writing at meghan-phillips.com and her tweets @mcarphil. She lives in Lancaster, PA, with her husband and son.

The genre2 interview

What is your preferred genre and why?

I primarily write flash fiction. I think the constraints of the genre work well with how my brain works. I am anxious and a bit obsessive. I get stuck on small details and strange facts. Flash is all about a kind of microscopic level attention to every element of the story.

Why did this piece compel you to move to this alternative genre?

I started these Jaws poems at an informal black out poetry studio hosted by the incredible writer and human Erin Dorney. My son was around 3 months old at the time, and I felt totally and completely incapable of any kind of creative work and also like I needed to get out of my house and at least be around people making stuff. The genre itself was what interested me, finding a poem in an existing text. The fact that these are Jaws poems is all circumstance. Jaws was just one of the many books Erin had brought for people to work with.

What challenges or surprises did you encounter while working in this genre?

Poetry in general is kind of mysterious to me. I don't understand line breaks, for one. I'm lucky to be friends with some amazing poets, and one of them told me that a line break will happen when you honor the phrase, and at the time, I was like "yes, absolutely" and also "I have no idea what that means." The actual logistics of erasing the text on the page is also really tricky. I "ruined" so many poems by over-erasing. And once you Sharpie over something, it's not coming back.