Twins, Myths, and Terror in David Marriott's Riverflesh

“The thing sheds its skin in water.”

The visceral nature and vagueness of this line sets the tone for rest of “Riverflesh,” as Marriott creates a world in which it’s hard to know what is what - a world that is both nightmare and myth, violence and creation, reality and terror. A world of gorges, pulsing chasms, naked goddesses, medusas, and monsters that reveal themselves to be your twin.

The second image of Part I is almost lovely – “Along this river lovers seek sanctuary” – but it is already tainted by the unnamable “thing” from the first line, and besides we soon learn that they are seeking sanctuary from “the poison of revenge gone native in the grass.” The next image is of a girl who “admires her half-exposed breasts,” while her spine is wracked and her knees bleed onto the snow. There’s a distance throughout the poem –the way it disorients, how you never know what’s around the next corner, the way you’re constantly kept from understanding the whole of anything.

The nightmarish quality of the poem is further invoked by “a calamitous dream of creation.” This phrase captures so much of the everything-at-once quality of the poem: how can a dream be a calamity? how could creation be a disaster? whose dream are we living in? I thought about origin myths and how Chaos so often is personified, a necessary counterpart to the ordering of the universe. (But is the Chaos the same as calamity?) Next there is a man, unnamed – we meet his “rib” first, possibly a biblical allusion? And finally there is the first mention of the speaker, who is not even introduced as an “I,” but as an “unmade being.” “

Throughout the poem, the speaker cannot be placed or located. The speaker doesn’t seem to even know who he is: “This experience has made me unnatural.” They are so alienated from their own body that they identify the “muscle between forefinger and thumb” as their true other. They describe themselves flailing in the womb: “My ripped seam the unsewn hole of Nothing.”

The speaker is most present in Part 3, which begins with “Another year has passed. I’ve returned to the place of my birth.” But we soon learn this place also belongs to the enemy, with whom the speaker feels more of a connection than to their own hand: “perhaps we are twins / -- tormentor, whose bright eyes are the shade of mine, mired in the same / bad blood.”

Part III further illustrates this twinning: “At sunrise, I will loosen some more of his flesh, / drive the point home into the molten cast / pupil, break the large bones. The creature is my echo / and my future.” These lines suggest that the speaker is the one in control. However, their relationship is not nearly so easy: “I am his nightfall, his abandoned grief / and my scarred surface never heals.” The speaker and their enemy are each other’s reflection, inextricable from one another. I’m also struck by how the enemy is described both as something so alive and threating -- a gorge, a pulsing chasm, a creature with inside-out organs that hunts the speaker -- as well as an object whose large bones can be broken. It makes me realize how everything is both maker and surface in this poem. A confusion of textures that makes me think of the title, “Riverflesh.” The slipperiness of it. I think about the way that terror knows no boundaries – it is both object and monster and echo and breasts lying on a filthy mass of rags. I think about how terror can be a twin, more real than your own body because it’s everywhere. Milking the afterbirth.