Fiona Jin
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Fiona Jin (she/her/hers) is a writer and artist in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. She lives for a sky one day less so on fire. You can find her at @fionajin07 on Twitter.
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Sign for the model tanks at Cantigny Park warns of slippery surfaces
because little boys who would’ve been unbodied in 1918 now monkey bar from machine gun barrels. In botanic garden sun, killing machines dormant under camouflage green paint remind me of the rubbery swing chain coatings that bombed sticky tween fingers into callouses three summers ago. I’m peeling the scab-like bark from a tree when someone says: “daddy, it [the unaliving part] is as long as I am.” Boy smiling Mentos-white teeth is measuring how much doughboy still roars with blood, ready to grenade itself. He is moistening palms against a painted skull and crossbones. The bark hacks off and cleaves open to a dried, dusty red as he explodes into Coke-colored mulch chips, and I imagine his elegy: died for his country, with sweaty hands that couldn’t hold on.
Commentary
Fiona on “Sign for the model tanks at Cantigny Park warns of slippery surfaces”:
People have called me the “human embodiment of poetry,” and that’s not necessarily a compliment. For better and for worse, writing is not only my profession but my life: I see infinite meaning in every moment, make fever from consciousness. The school year had ended unusually early, in May, and soon after I visited what I thought was a botanical garden. It was, but amongst flowers and fountains I also found hordes of toddlers swarming over models of WWI-era tanks—coated with protective green paint, bolted to the ground, with plaques listing fun facts and warning about slippery surfaces—as if the park had anticipated that children would play violence like a toy. As if violence could ever be a toy. As if the most concerning part of a toddler measuring their height with a machine gun was the possibility of falling into the mulch below. That night, I exiled myself and a smartphone to the backyard and typed the first draft of this prose poem in essentially one sitting as the sun fell. In this piece, I juxtaposed imagery of brutality and war with symbols of childlike innocence (playground equipment). I used a very steady, barren tone, leaving bare the horrific nature of these words for readers.
My poetry is ultimately born from such strong emotion. The ideas for my most successful poems almost always start with an ephemeral image representing some truth felt so intensely and necessarily yet so frustratingly unsaid that I must see it to tangibility, make fireworks from precious flame before it sputters back into the barely unknown. In “Sign for the model tanks at Cantigny Park warns of slippery surfaces,” I wanted every sentence to be a bomb, to make the world feel the eerie nature of dysfunctional childhood borne from the desensitization and romanticization of war and violence, this dangerous complacency.
EIC Christine Taylor on “Sign for the model tanks at Cantigny Park warns of slippery surfaces”:
What I loved about Fiona’s poem most is the careful attention to detail and the deliberate selection of images that of course paint a picture of the scene, but more importantly develop the sad irony of the children’s loss of innocence. Here, we are forced to confront this country’s fascination with the relics of war and the romanticization of war-time eras.
People have called me the “human embodiment of poetry,” and that’s not necessarily a compliment. For better and for worse, writing is not only my profession but my life: I see infinite meaning in every moment, make fever from consciousness. The school year had ended unusually early, in May, and soon after I visited what I thought was a botanical garden. It was, but amongst flowers and fountains I also found hordes of toddlers swarming over models of WWI-era tanks—coated with protective green paint, bolted to the ground, with plaques listing fun facts and warning about slippery surfaces—as if the park had anticipated that children would play violence like a toy. As if violence could ever be a toy. As if the most concerning part of a toddler measuring their height with a machine gun was the possibility of falling into the mulch below. That night, I exiled myself and a smartphone to the backyard and typed the first draft of this prose poem in essentially one sitting as the sun fell. In this piece, I juxtaposed imagery of brutality and war with symbols of childlike innocence (playground equipment). I used a very steady, barren tone, leaving bare the horrific nature of these words for readers.
My poetry is ultimately born from such strong emotion. The ideas for my most successful poems almost always start with an ephemeral image representing some truth felt so intensely and necessarily yet so frustratingly unsaid that I must see it to tangibility, make fireworks from precious flame before it sputters back into the barely unknown. In “Sign for the model tanks at Cantigny Park warns of slippery surfaces,” I wanted every sentence to be a bomb, to make the world feel the eerie nature of dysfunctional childhood borne from the desensitization and romanticization of war and violence, this dangerous complacency.
EIC Christine Taylor on “Sign for the model tanks at Cantigny Park warns of slippery surfaces”:
What I loved about Fiona’s poem most is the careful attention to detail and the deliberate selection of images that of course paint a picture of the scene, but more importantly develop the sad irony of the children’s loss of innocence. Here, we are forced to confront this country’s fascination with the relics of war and the romanticization of war-time eras.
