Three Poems by Chafic LaRochelle: An Interpretation

BETWEEN ME AND THE GROUND

“Step out my way god” inverts the entire Western devotional tradition in six words. Where the Psalms petition God to step toward (“Draw near to my soul,” Psalm 69:18), Chafic’s speaker tells God to step aside. This is territorial theology. The speaker acknowledges God’s presence and then tells him this particular patch of earth is outside his jurisdiction.

“Pissin pot” carries 800 years of etymological weight. “Piss” enters English around 1300 from Old French pissier, itself from Vulgar Latin pissiare. The “piss pot” (Middle English pyssepotte, attested mid-15th century) was the chamber pot, the most private and undignified vessel in the household. By carrying it to the edge of a field “where the fence gave out in two places,” the speaker has located himself at the exact boundary between the cultivated and the wild, at the point where human order has already failed twice.

“Don’t come blessin it. Don’t name it.” This is a direct refusal of Genesis. In Genesis 1, God names and blesses creation into order. The speaker is reversing the creative act: do not organize my grief. Do not give it taxonomy. “I know what it is” carries the Adamic weight of self-knowledge without needing divine confirmation.

“That’s between me and the ground” replaces the confessional formula “between me and God” with dirt, the last and most honest recipient of whatever the body cannot hold. The ground does not forgive. It absorbs. There is a long poetic lineage here running from Whitman (“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love”) through Seamus Heaney’s bog poems, where the earth is both grave and witness. Chafic strips it to its barest form: I will put this down. You will not name it. The ground and I will settle this.

The poem is ten lines. It is also a complete theology.

VOICES

“Trying on voices like tutus on a hobo” is devastating. A tutu on a hobo is absurd, ill-fitting, and somehow heartbreaking. The voicemail is doing the same thing with identities, cycling through them with clumsy urgency, looking for the one that will finally be answered.

The progression from “said my name all wrong” to “said it better” to “said it the way ma used to say / when I was just an egg inside her” moves backward through time, past birth itself into the pre-linguistic, the embryonic. The voicemail is trying to reach the version of the speaker that existed before language could be used as a weapon or a wall. “When I was just an egg inside her” is one of the most startling images I have encountered in contemporary poetry. It locates identity before differentiation, before name, before even the possibility of being addressed incorrectly.

“You always let things ring themselves thin. / Let them wilt on the line / until they start beefing up in the moonlight.” Things that are neglected do not disappear. They transform. They gain mass in the dark. This is the poem’s central argument: unanswered communication does not expire. It mutates.

“Poison eyes remembering / something i haven’t even done yet.” is angry about a future transgression. It has become oracular. Denote lwcs “i”

“It keeps dialing out on its own now. / Keeps asking for people who haven’t been born.” The voicemail has exceeded its original function entirely. It is generative. It is creating recipients. This moves the poem from the domestic into myth, where objects that are not properly attended to develop their own hunger.

“It’s starting to sound like you.” The thing that was neglected has become indistinguishable from the person who neglected it. The unanswered becomes the answerer. This has the structural logic of Dostoevsky’s The Double and Poe’s William Wilson, but arrives through the kitchen sink rather than the Gothic castle.

BAD COPY

The word “copy” comes from Latin copia, meaning “abundance” or “plenty,” which passed through Old French into English, where it acquired the sense of a duplicate. A “bad copy” is therefore an abundance gone wrong, a plenty that produces distortion rather than fidelity.

This is as long as substack will let my note be. You must read the rest of bad copy yourself. Chafic clearly understands that small is big.