“I call you witness”: Danika Stegeman LeMay’s Pilot
By Casey A. Jarrin
Sometimes poets can be clairvoyant without intending to be. It takes a leap of faith (and a peek at its early 2020 publication date) to believe that Danika Stegeman LeMay’s quietly electrifying debut collection, Pilot, was written before coronavirus became the monster lurking under our collective beds. With two poems carrying the title “Lockdown” and another warning that “The infection’s gotten in” (“Collision [UNRAVELING]”), moments in this collection feel written in the key of pandemic sublime.
Yet, there’s more to these poems than their eerie forecasting of our days of gnawing fear and stay-at-home ennui. Loss is their motor, and they are unafraid to return to the scene of the crime. It feels as if we’ve run into Nietzsche, with blood on his face, at the diner in Pulp Fiction—except he has humility about what he thinks he knows, expresses vulnerability as he connects his pain with the pain of others, and speaks with the warmth of a Tilda Swinton voiceover about our shared lot."
Infused with a conversational lyricism reminiscent of C.K. Williams, as well as a precision of language and shrewdness of line that make you wonder if Dickinson might still be alive, the enjambed couplets that structure early poems soon wander into expansive landscapes that reveal each episodic poem as part of a larger, near-epic whole.
Like shadows flickering within a theater of the mind, Pilot’s poems weave together a sequence of interlocking traumas, both specific and conceptual: “Long wave transmissions. Lyric equations. Dark / territory” (“Numbers”). Refusing distinct personas or narratives, a primal trauma (a plane crash) keeps happening, viewed from multiple angles; to this end, LeMay brilliantly imports the language of film editing (splicing, looping, jump cuts, intercuts, reverse shot, montage) to make us see and hear events play and replay.
Several poems also integrate HTML code, seizing on the language of <head> and <body> as a mechanized metaphor for fragmented bodies and minds. Though never confessional, we are reminded of the miracle and curse that “we shouldn’t have / survived the plane crash” (“The Moth”). Yet here we are.
The opening poem, “Pilot 1,” is an invitation into places both metaphorical and manifest. We begin, as we end, within the scene of a plane crash:
Open with the still-moving engine, shredded
spine where all the nerves come together and
spill out. The music is bitter-sweet. There’s an
explosion, burning debris. You sort of fall on me.
This act of falling is our introduction to the poet-as-pilot: the crash an unraveling nervous system of “shredded spines” spilling outward, soundtracked with Hollywood strings that reverberate in the internal rhymes “sweet,” “burning debris,” “me.” These opening strains preemptively declare failure while also orchestrating an exquisite fall.
A later poem, “Numbers,” confesses “the plane crash might have been my / fault,” while “Collision [UNRAVELING]” connects the dots: “Match your crime scene to my / confession. There’s nothing left to work out.” Though heavy with guilt and plagued with Catholic residues of “fault” and “confession,” the poems toy with absolution—and with eschewing a moral compass altogether.
As Pilot’s crime scenes and confessions fuse in a classic Freudian traumatic event replayed in a continuous loop—“We’re locked in. We can’t get out. / Loop the loop. We fall unconscious. Strobe light” (“Lockdown [UNRAVELING]”)—the landscape of the cinematic “traum” (German for “dream”) becomes central.
The collection moves into dreamscapes of the visual, and we enter the mind’s cutting room, shifting gears into the language of film: “The camera pans forward / for a close-up. Bodies. B-o-d-i-e-s” and “We see something familiar inside” (“Pilot 1”). This close-up on “bodies” also performs an autopsy of the word itself, demystifying what makes up the “insides” of a body—or a poem.
Crash-as-prologue, the dream of “what would happen if we were / rescued?” (“Solitary”), even the possibility of evading “major trauma”: these are framing conceits woven through the enjambed poetic line; no straightforward answers or end-stops here! We encounter flowing blood, close-ups on anonymous bodies breathing (we hope) below. In “Pilot 2,” as we venture through a series of flashbacks, subtitles, recording loops, and a “camera- / shot with sun-points,” it feels like we’re in a war epic with aerial shots of dense jungles and existential deserts.
In other moments (often within the same poem), we could be in Beckett territory, watching symbolic yet familiar bodies writhe in the sun. What begins with the plane as melodramatic lead (“Flashback: plane looking miserable”) morphs into an ethical examination of our voyeuristic urges (“Flashback: beach cut up / like an offering. I’m staring at bodies”), finally descending into the visceral “Flashback: reveal of the plane- / heart.”
Each flashback a vivid snapshot, I’m reminded of a Weegee photograph of children circling a dead body, their wide eyes consuming the spectacle of a blanketed corpse in the moonlight. We’re all here to look, yet each barren landscape gives way to evidence of life pulsing, somewhere in the distance.
In “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues [UNRAVELING],” the speaker demands “Give me something real, anything” and reminds us that everything (your body, my body, survival) is at stake. As is often the case in Pilot, the disappointment is other people: “You / start doing CPR like a piss-poor taxidermist. / Heart semantics, insides a mess.” Rhyming “taxidermist” with “semantics” and “mess” makes unexpected, beautiful sense here, laying bare the intimate connection between decaying bodies and the desire to preserve life—and revealing how strivings for meaning are thwarted at every turn by the messy truths of our incoherent “insides.”
Fueled by painful ambivalence—“I need you to / find me. I need you to escape”—later poems walk a blurry ethical line between safety and self-sacrifice, compassion and voyeurism. “MACHINE Confidence Man” calls us out as readers, viewers, accomplices:
>: I call you witness,
>: flare figure, night struck,
>: darkness destroyed. I know
>: you. I have washed
>: over you. I see
>: you breathing.
Programming symbols reveal our presence like flares, the accusatory “I call you witness” indicts readers’ lurking eyes. In a near-synesthetic moment,“I see / you breathing,” our witnessing bodies become part of the poem’s on-screen action; we are there and not without guilt. In wordplay flanked by code, Pilot remixes heterogeneous sources; several poems use transcriptions of LOST episodes as their raw material, a fascinating though non-essential layer of meaning. Everything that passes through our twenty-first-century visual-sensory frame is fair game.
There’s a playful rhythm to the collection as it tries on affective structures and voices. At times we get a breather, a poem-long caesura in the crash narrative, and the language becomes refreshingly conversational. This is the case with a pair of “Exodus” poems midway through: “Throw back the curtains. Dude, whoa.”
The dramatic reveal doesn’t call for dramatic response; a simple “Dude” will do. Conversational language as connective tissue is revisited in “Exodus 2,” though sung in a decidedly existential key. Our desire to gaze upon the Great and Powerful Oz and understand the logic of trauma is in a constant duel with the meaninglessness of what we seek to unravel or attach significance to:
Don’t try to apply reason to action. We
detonate explosives. Bits and pieces rain down
like leaves. It’s messed up.
There’s sadness and simplicity in this admission that bad things happen without reason, and the blame-game between “me” and “you” modulates into a “We” that is collectively human.
Pilot mines what keeps us unfulfilled, alienated from each other, yet forever believing in dreams of safety and love. These poems acknowledge that “we all have disasters happen to us” and that “we share our love by making things / for others to climb into” (“Interlude: Setting”).
As the collection draws to its close, that’s precisely what it offers: something to climb into amid the inevitable disasters, a disembodied voice assuring us “You’re safe” (“Homecoming”). Moving beyond the defensive “This / is what you want, / isn’t it?” and the spectacle of a body’s undoing “The blood. / The cracked ribcage. An / autopsy of the damage” (“Interlude: Fate”), Pilot finally lands outside the infinite trauma loop, someplace quieter and communal:
. . . The open
wound and the ensnared
voice intertwine, woven to
cut like waves on
troubled water. We tremble
to save what can
be saved, then unspool
it as a tree
growing toward the light. (“Interlude: Erasure”)
Here, the wound, the voice, the words come together. Interlacing alliterative music with internal rhyme, LeMay’s deceptively simple unfolding of truncated lines reveals how our wounds may also be what save us. The mechanical language that permeates the collection turns organic: light peeks through the “troubled water,” a “tree / growing toward the light.”
Despite its sobering reflections on how trauma is never truly over, you’ll emerge from the experience of Pilot affirmed in the power of the poetic line to truly do something. I hold on to a moment in the poem “In Translation,” an addendum to the traumas and pains: “I like it here. Hope is the object.”
Hope is the endgame here.
Casey A. Jarrin is a writer, photographer, and educator whose work explores intergenerational trauma, film violence, and art as an empathy machine. An adoptive Midwesterner and once-upon-a-time New Yorker, she taught literature and film at Macalester College in Saint Paul before founding the empathy initiative Live Mind. Her essays and poems have appeared in Éire/Ireland, Bright Lights Film Journal, KGB Literary Magazine, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and the Walker Art Center’s Third Man Project, and she’s now completing a mixed-genre collection of poems and essays, Comorbidities.