Fig Cartography by Jane Flett
Associate Poetry Editor Jenn McMahon on today’s bonus poem: Toeing an often unseen line between violence and romance, Jane Flett’s “Fig Cartography” is wonderfully bittersweet. Try as we might “not to take everything as a metaphor,” it becomes quite impossible as Flett places the strikingly intuitive image of the obligate mutual relationship between fig and wasp—a relationship in which a female fig wasp must enter a fruit to lay her eggs and be digested inside—at the center of this improbable love poem. With lines like “it is so easy to love something with a secret wasp heart,” Flett’s words urge readers to consider what may lie beyond the observable surface of an insect-like mechanism of love. Exploring emotional entanglement further, in the final moments of the poem, Flett details the dance of attraction through the lens of complex bio mutualistic give and take. In reading love as analogically parallel to the life of the fig wasp, readers may find that nothing so seemingly tender, and vitally necessary, can exist without a macabre edge—in this case, the inevitable, sweet, and seeded crunch of enzymatically digested legs between one’s teeth.
FIG CARTOGRAPHY
How to begin this? There’s a dead wasp
in the depths of every fig you’ve ever eaten.
These days, I’m trying not to take everything
as metaphor, but still. It’s the audacity I find
hard to bear. My friend considers every fig
an erotic revelation—sends me photographs
of splayed red flesh and through her eyes
I am there. Something already drenched
and begging for ravage. This is what desire does.
It makes an obscenity of the earth. And I think
I can never tell her, never risk the ruin. Who
am I to lodge a seed of venom and exoskeleton?
And then I think: she knows, of course
she already knows. It is so easy to love something
with a secret wasp heart. I don’t know why
we love like this, except to say: you felt it too,
didn’t you? First you shirk and then you lean
closer, longing for sweetness, but better than that,
longing for the crunch of legs between your teeth.
Jane Flett is a Scottish writer based in Berlin. She is the author of the novel Freakslaw (Doubleday/Zando). Her poetry has been published in POETRY Magazine, Magma, and the Best British Poetry. Her short fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio and featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. Jane is also one half of the riot grrrl band Razor Cunts and a founder of Queer Stories Berlin.
