Head Off and Split, poems made of guts

I love the multiple ways the title “Head Off and Split” was used throughout this work. My first interpretation of the title, before reading the book, was “heading off” or “splitting up”, a command to head off and split up, to run away or escape. In Resurrection of the Errand Girl: An Introduction, “Head Off and Split?” is a question about how the girl wants her dinner fish: “Translation: Do away with the watery gray eyes, the impolite razor-sharp fins, the succulent heart, tender roe, delicate sweet bones? Polite, dutiful, training to be a mother, bride, kitchen frau. Her answer, Yes.” Her answer changes when she’d older: “No. Not this time. This time, she wants what she was once sent for left whole, just as it was pulled from the sea, everything born to it still in place… she would rather be the one deciding what she keeps and what she throws away.” She takes on the power of gutting fish herself, understanding what can be lost in the cutting away of bones and other organs.

In the poem, Head Off and Split, the phrase seems to take on the idea of leaving and serving fish, but this time it is the speaker being gutted. As she leaves her parents home, for the 803^rd time, she is the one being beheaded and split down the middle. She is heading off and being split. Split between her past and her present, the north and the south, her parents expectations. There’s not a lot of personal agency involved in being gutted and sold, and she says as much : “ Once again The eggnog anesthesia from the long holiday visit has not worked I am aware of all the pulling The tugging All the hands on the inside of me Doing their business Making a Daytona 500 of my lungs I am unable to do anything about it Those who are suited up don’t know I am awake In every New England Journal this is called unethical”.  

Nikky Finney’s work is rich, full of history, food, and velvet. Her use of repetition in Negroes with Guns is great, and I especially liked the line “the mother who can shoot the first and second s from out the middle of grasshopper, without browning the grass or decapitating the hop hop, stares out into the field of yellowing pine for sign of insect life or other other.” She turns the word grasshopper into an actual grasshopper, her marksmanship so precise she can shoot off labels. The two women in Cattails are referred to a different way each time they are referenced: the driving woman, the woman being driven to, the pedal-to-the-metal woman, the didn’t-know-she-was-coming woman. In a way, they are also Head Off and Split, served in pieces. Each part of what something or someone is gets shared. It is a bundle of cattails, it is twenty pounds, it is what falling in love without permission smells like. These poems are wrapped up and served, Head Off and Split, not by a fishmonger, but by Finney. She wields the whale-bone knife herself, reminding in Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica to be “careful to the very end what you deny, dismiss, & cut away.”