The Beauty of the In-Between: On Angie Mazakis’s "I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First"

Angie Mazakis | I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First | The University of Arkansas Press | 2020 | 73 Pages

Ten years ago, sitting in a workshop circle, a poet referenced a poem about the end of time, with a speaker who stands in a great crowd, holding an orange—“I will be standing at the edge / of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,” goes the poem, “and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd / or anything else so that I am of it, / I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.” The poet held out her hand, palm up, fingers cupping an imaginary orange. The poem was Mary Ruefle’s “The Kiss of the Sun,” and the poet recounting the poem was Angie Mazakis, whose debut collection I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First was selected by Billy Collins as a finalist for the 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.

Imagine the orange tossed in the air—the simultaneous connection and distance of the image, the two persons meant to be connected by the thrown fruit. I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First is that orange, tossed in the air. 

Mazakis’s collection opens with an epigraph from Ronald Johnson’s Ark:

The first anatomists likened the brain,

pulp and rind, to an orange.

Its beginnings are a mulberry of cells,

and all desire and despair

are seeded in its un- and in-foldings. 

Like Ruefle and Johnson, Mazakis is interested in the layered potential of the narrative (and narrated) world, and in the emotional distance and nearness of memory, the fruit of our days. Consider the opening poem, which folds the multiple generations, languages, geographies and medical needs of one family into itself:

In a suburb outside of Chicago, my parents

sit next to each other at their respective dialysis machines.

Outside, the trees aren’t touching each other.

In tercets, the poem narrates family complexity and closeness, the history of a life-saving shove:

My dad first knew he needed glasses when he was standing 

on a landing in his family’s apartment building in West 

Beirut during the War of 1958; he couldn’t see the gun

pointing at him from the building across the street.

His mother pushed him out of the way and took him to the

eye doctor the next day.

Throughout the poem runs a joke about the family expression “Oh my kidneys,” but the joke is lost in a summarization, and a distinct quality of this poem is that it is spoken to you, the reader, by a narrator who can tell good stories, who you want to sit with even (and especially!) when the story isn’t the absolute truth. “I lied,” confesses the speaker, “My parents each go to different dialysis centers in different / suburbs of Chicago, but whenever I picture them they’re / together.” Mazakis has a light touch when handling heaviness and grief (the failing health of parents, bombings in Beirut), but the speaker of her poem shows how that gentle handling is an inheritance. Consider the mother in the poem, lost in the Chicago suburbs:

She was supposed to see houses, but instead she saw water

and trees. “I went the wrong way,” she said,

“and the wrong way is beautiful.”

Or the poem’s closing scene between the speaker and dad:

I put the last piece of namoura cake in my dad’s mouth,

but he says he can’t taste the same way anymore. He can’t

taste the orange blossom water. “I can taste it,” he says,

“but its way far away, like we’re still walking toward it.”

The poems of I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First are fascinated by the (mis)reading of thoughts and facial expressions, by the (mis)connections taking place between people. There is a visual-art-like fascination, too, for the gestures of hands—and what hands pick up and put down—while the names of friends and characters appear like the cards of a gently flipped rolodex. Mazakis is a poet who is ruefully, beautifully attentive—her speaker strikingly wry, self-mocking. In “Every Miss Universe Contestant Is from Earth,” the omniscient narrator reminds the speaker how “Everyone who destroyed you thought / They had acted just find according / to the Geneva Convention,” but observes, “you were left speaking only / in spondees: Wait here. Don’t go. Find me.” 

With an adroit sense of humor, Mazakis reminds her reader that the speaker is a human narrator and not a surveillance camera, or a plain recording of human days. The poem “Aircraft Safety Information Pamphlet” examines the expressions and postures of the cartoon instructions found in an airplane seat pocket, explaining: “This is the most casual escape in the history of escapes.” The emergency becomes a made-thing, complete with imagined illustrator (“and then his boss said, Stop dinking around, Bill”), and imagined straits: 

There is a mountain near them, in the background,

which makes the cartoon passengers think,

Look how narrowly we escaped that mountain. 

Yet poems like “Red String Theory,” “Call on Janus,” and “How to Take a River with You” demonstrate a poet as deeply invested in subjectivity and interiority as it is surfaces, in entwinements of history—real and imaginary—and hybrid, prosimetric forms. Along with the father and mother, the friends who appear and disappear throughout the poems, so, too does Beirut, the naming (and erasure) of Palestine and Palestinians, and Arabic language in the speaker’s life (“Then I hear / my own voice asking for apples in English, / and I am back in Indiana, where there / is a word for privacy). Olives on a plate are a question of history, of circumstance, of the Jordan river and its two banks:

I leave olives on my plate and

think about them being picked

from the same tree, sent to different

factories, packed in separate jars,

then finding their way in another

country to the same dish.

Mazakis invokes Janus, god of portals, “temple god who looked / forward and backward at the same time— / god of beginnings, doorways, transitions / passages, endings.” Overseer of all liminal spaces and corridors, in “Call on Janus,” the god becomes “provider of hallways, purgatory, / intestines, creator of gyms in airports, / bestower of the sky as the sun is on / its way.” The ideal muse and guardian for this book, Janus reigns over the overlooked spaces, the underways, and the mysteries of relationship and correlation: “connect us more / seamlessly from image to metaphor,” the speaker petitions. Opening with a memory of violence and tragedy, the poem stretches itself between the doorway of father and daughter, the past and the present:

Watching kids in a movie throw

water balloons from a rooftop,

my dad says, “As a game, boys

would climb the rooftops

in Beirut and shoot at passing cars.

One boy shot his father’s car

by accident. Then he shot himself.”

A movie, then a commercial, remind the dad of “the war in his hometown,” of a man tied between cars and pulled apart—“then both cars drove / away, one east and one west.” The poem works to connect the doors of generational experience and generational loss—the distance between the father and the daughter’s histories, the hurt that is wound into the retelling. To acknowledge the violence of war and the history of Palestine held by the poem is to better hear the poet’s closing petition and prayer: “Janus, bestow upon us the beauty / of the in-between that provides reprieve—.” Beauty and aesthetics become something else here—a hallway between “the magnetic pull of retreat / and anticipation, illuminating / the before and after, pulling us / both ways at once.” The grammar of the poem’s final stanza asks that the reader sit with it—not rush ahead into claims of beauty and aesthetics, of the (imaginary) good of suffering. 

When one thinks about connections between this collection and poetry of witness, one realizes that Mazakis’s poetry is a particular inflection of witness, nested between father and daughter, poet and reader, a company of friends. One that centers tenderness, mediation, and the bright interior life of the speaker. To return to the image of the tossed orange: the person throwing the orange does so in the hope that someone else is there to watch for its bright arc. Mazakis’s poetry affirms the reason we come to art: for a particular relationship between ourselves and others, for an encounter with the real—to experience stories and songs that we ourselves could not tell or sing.