https://youtu.be/uzix0NNftPU

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM: I am an immigrant, nomadic desperate for home,
to hammer myself into existence
out of pain in depths of yearning—
for what it’s too immense to bookend in language,
perhaps only indicted by silence inserting itself
into the form,
the only self-portrait I still trust.

I am a book without pages,
textured with continents of feeling,
narratives adrift,
unlatched from each other,
passersby that do not
even graze gazes.

I a solitude of friction between
antagonist, protagonist.
I am a nest rigged,
unsettled high in the
chokehold of branches.

I am three:
tiny, frosted fingers caked with unbaked dough,
marble blue eyes glinting in flashes of exposures.
My mother’s ear just beyond the camera,
my jean jumper, chilled kitchen tiles
redeeming me back into a body,
inside the thought that I am one at all.

All I am: an isthmus of thick froth, melting chocolate chips
nurturing the sensorium of decadence against tongue,
summer falling like a painting through the back door,
foregrounding my living lore,
the high volume of aliveness.

I am nine in ballet shoes and leotard
inner legs skirting a horse’s mythic rib cage
cantering through campgrounds after dance,
hair flossing the periphery of eyelids,
helmet holstering my head,
codifying my mixed media of kinesthetics,
stretching the kite of romantic light filling
the vista enshrining the fence fencing
wild horses, geese in shocks of gold,
a literature of self-reliance in enacted experience,
hands holding fast to the mane of affirmative hair
roiling in the midday heat.

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I am 20 negating my dear affection for the word
to negotiate the sciences,
left hand wedded to pencil,
numbers screeching through lead onto page after page,
consumed by an excess of equations—
how to balance them,
make all of the atoms content,
as though each molecule had a mouth calling its rage up
from the page—
my upper lip bitten into by lower teeth.
I am my own muzzle,
as though the numbers trapped me there in ember, the pencil erasing me,
the accumulation of the solvable aggregating at the base of the throat,
ghosting me out of being a being
in need of regular snack, bathroom breaks.

I am an experiment
breaking all the rules of
experiments,
the central tenant:
reproducibility.

I take issue with being now, at almost 30, at an impasse
with being those girls,
this one derived from the
ambush of a stroke stoking feeling out of my right interior,
an objectionable experiment running out of control,
out of senses to lose,
out of reproducing any semblance of myself
I know as myself,
out of stock of emotion
dragging me through, into.

I am not even a fiction projected onto a history,
not even a hovering presence.

I am so far away from my nested selves that
I’m outside them now,
an absence vanishing into silences that
generate all of the amplification.

Truth, trust: I need to anchor my weary body,
because I’ve lost my reference, my voice, my rhetoric,
so I’m unzipping structures—
theorems, sonnets, narrative, farewell.

I let myself wane because all I trust now:
these gaps to be my guide, and when they can no longer guide me,
I will step into them so they can swallow me,
so I don’t need to explain the inexplicable,
to remember what I cannot forget.

Get to know the poet:

1) What is the theme of your poem?
This poem explores the simultaneity of speechlessness and the articulable in the wake of sudden trauma.

2) What motivated you to write this poem?
Writing is equivalent to breathing; in is an elemental feature of being this version of myself.

3) How long have you been writing poetry?
Since childhood, although it never occupied this central position before my stroke.

4) If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would that be?
Jorie Graham, my favorite living poet.

5) What influenced you to submit to have your poetry performed by a professional actor?
I am eager for my voice to be heard after almost 2 years of silence since my stroke.

6) Do you write other works? scripts? Short Stories? Etc..?
I am a poet and craft poetry on a daily basis as a survival mechanism.

7) What is your passion in life?
I am passionate about language, about converting silence and suffering into a sacred ritual of music making.