Zeller, Maya Jewell

United States, (contemporary)

TORI AMOS NURSING THE PIG

  1. I didn’t know anything yet
  2.  
  3. I was fifteen and what I knew was next to nothing
  4.  
  5. I had gathered my father’s Camel Cash and mailed it
  6. for a portable CD player
  7.  
  8. I could plug in my headphones and keep the music to myself
  9. in that loud house
  10. of smoke and hamburger meat
  11. and a crying sister and my one window that looked out to the moon
  12.  
  13. It seemed the moon was always full so I joined the Columbia House
  14. Music Club and they would mail me fourteen CDs now and then I could pay
  15. $1.99 per CD if I bought eight in the next year
  16.  
  17. and I ordered with abandon, or what I thought was abandon,
  18. Wilson Phillips and Mariah Carey
  19. and the Eurythmics, and then Tori Amos, who I’d never heard
  20. on the radio but who I thought looked cool, and her album
  21. came with her nursing a pig and I thought Oh God, exactly—
  22.  
  23. I didn’t know anything yet but I thought nursing a pig
  24. was probably somewhere in my future
  25. and I took my Discman to the barn and laid there in my hay fort
  26. and thought about that little mouth,
  27. its tiny teeth and black eyes and probing snout
  28. and how Tori looked so blissed out in her open leather jacket
  29. or was it a blouse and how she sat on the porch in her rocking chair
  30. with her shotgun and the mud all over her leg and she looked like
  31. she was saying Go ahead and try me, you bastards, which is what I thought
  32. all day in school and didn’t say—

Editor’s Note:

tori amos with piglet 1

This poem’s title refers to a photograph included in the record album Boys for Pele (original release), written and produced by singer/songwriter Tori Amos. The album was released by Atlantic Recording Corporation in 1985.

When discussing the “the pig picture” from the album in an interview on CFNY on January 29th, 1996, Tori Amos described her choice to and experience with nursing or breast feeding a piglet:

You know it was always that thing of wrong wrong wrong..bad bad bad and I really wanted to have a picture visual.. and Cindy and I really talked about it… I just kept seeing these visions of me breast feeing a pig… I kept seeing this! And I said… I know what this means to me… and people can look at it how they want… I mean… I’m like… that’s when I think a photograph works… when it brings up a lot of different stuff. But it was a cute little critter… it was just so cute… it pooped all over my skirt… and peed… and it was so… he was having such a good time… he just nustled in… and he did his business… and ah… obviously I’m not feeding now… so he was a bit disappointed… but he fell asleep… and it was really fun.

And in an interview with Michael Jackson on his US radio show on KABC, Los Angeles (790 AM) on February 9, 1996 she added:

The picture represents that which is hidden, that which we’re ashamed of, the non-kosher. To bring it back home, to nurse it, to nurture it. There’s so much shame. There’s so much that’s hidden about our feelings that makes us crazy, that makes us do things to ourselves and other people which causes all this pain. So this is about freeing that and acknowledging it.

© Maya Jewell Zeller. The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. April 20th, 2017. http://www.theshallowends.com/.

About the Poet:

Maya Jewell Zeller, United States, (contemporary) is a poet and educator. She has taught writing and literature to high school and college students, fourth graders, and senior citizens, and has twice been a writer-in-residence in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. Zeller is also an Assistant Professor, teaching creative writing, at Central Washington University.

She also serves as fiction editor for Crab Creek Review and as poetry editor for Scablands Books. Zeller is the author of the poetry collections Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (a collaboration with visual artist Carrie DeBacker (2017), Rust Fish (2011) and Yesterday, the Bees (2015). [DES-11/19]

Additional information:

  • More on Zeller at: https://mayajewellzeller.com/
  • Follow her on Twitter @MayaJZeller
  • Crab Creek Review is a Seattle area literary journal that publishes the best in poetry and short fiction from the Northwest and beyond.
  • Scablands Books – a boutique press based in Spokane, Washington, specializing in strange, smart, innovative writing.
  • Tori Amos info at yessaid – t o r i p h o r i a, the Tori Amos digital archives
  • The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry, giving readers a glimpse of one poet, one poem per week. Because sometimes you want to dip your toes before diving in…