Hard Reset for Beginners drop everything you’re holding onto drop the muscles around your brow, jaw drop the notion of need drop the notion of notions see the air in front of you see one thing behind it know it is here as much as you are here close your eyes and hear the hum of silence hear the patterns of the hum and clicking, chirping wind feel your feet the bottoms pushing earth down and feel the earth rising in response to meet them inhale fill your whole chest and stomach take delight in sweet ease being surrounded by abundance always exhale and feel your body empty still and ready without your knowing without your help your body it does everything and all you have to do is live
An Apology Sorry for being so enchanting — sorry for the way my hips sway while the ripe fruit that is my ass follows through, plump and smooth. Sorry for being your first fire, the awakening of your loins or whatever. And dear, I’m so sorry that every time I laugh spring comes again, that wild azaleas sprout from my tongue and fingertips saying take care of yourself for me would you? I’m sorry that when you see me in the moonlight, you can’t help but swoon and swear you’d tether the bright crescent just for me if only, if only. Sorry that my eyes shine like some number of suns — how many did you say? Anyway — Maybe if I were more like you — more odd and morose and always hunched, hesitating and pale, plain as a potato — maybe then you wouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night with a poem in your gut maybe you wouldn’t have to write and rewrite to get it right maybe you’d be happy I’m sorry my beauty doesn’t behave, that I cannot keep it from shifting in your gaze — I cannot keep you from looking foolish — Can’t you see that every butterfly you’ve caught and framed, every petal you’ve plucked and rubbed to nothing between your thumb and finger is a ghost haunting you?
Poetic Ideas After Mary Szybist I had the poetic idea to videotape my feet everywhere they walked for weeks and I had the poetic idea to play it backwards and call it My Month of Moonwalking. I had the poetic idea to throw the whole project in the trash and burn it. I had the poetic idea to eavesdrop on people’s conversations in the supermarket and later I had the idea to write them down as a screenplay. I had the poetic idea to steal words directly from the mouths of strangers. I had the poetic idea to go on a hunger strike — until I had the better idea to order pizza and meticulously note the mouthfeel of every bite. I had the poetic idea to fall in love an abstract concept. I had the poetic idea to ask the abstract concept on a date — it had its own idea to just stay friends. I had the poetic idea to be heartbroken and to stay that way. I had the poetic idea to wear a blue beret and that each day I would be entirely reborn. That was my most poetic idea.
Third Date with a Girl I Met on Tinder The circumference of her thighs — the strip of skin between her dress hem and elastic edge of thigh-high socks — that ribbon of flesh is freckled sin. She twists her hair into a fair-trade artisanal woven product, her fingers play the harp strings of her shampooed tresses while she tells me about a time she got arrested for spray painting PUSSY on the side of her own house. And just like that she slows time she closes her eyes holds me and breathes hot cigarettes hot cinnamon into my mouth she speaks a foreign language with her tongue on my tongue on my teeth — and leaves before I can even swallow the spit I remember kissing her as taking the first bite from an apple.
A Small Autobiography I was ten I was so sick it hurt to move to even lie down or bathe I asked my sister to help me get dressed but she forgot and didn’t hear me calling out from lukewarm bath water shivering I nearly fainted when I stood up I dried myself on the carpet of the master bedroom floor The doctor didn’t know what I had — only that it wasn’t mono I stayed home from school for two months filling out homework packets my mom picked up. I felt like I was dying until I started to feel better. my fever broke and sores started sprouting in my mouth — first one then ten then twenty — on every surface: my gums, tongue, cheeks, my soft palate. Drinking water stung and eating hurt even more. The doctor looked at my pus-smelling mouth like a spelunker diving inside a swamp cavern and still didn’t know what it was it wasn’t mono that’s for sure and told me to rinse with salt water and rest. Talking hurt just as much as eating but I didn’t need to talk, really. A week went by hungry and crying swishing saline around yellow blisters. Another week and I managed to eat soft things and speak though sounding like my tongue was inflated twice its size. I was hard to understand. On a weekend morning when the sores were almost gone, my mom, my sister and I went to JC Penney’s to spend money we didn’t have. while browsing the junior’s department my mom looked away from the clothes and at me and told me I look like I’m losing some weight and that I look cute, like I am getting a “cute shape.” The girl on the poster behind her smiled mouth open laughing like she heard a really good joke. I passed a mirror on the way out saw a girl staring back at me wearing my clothes, wearing my skin I chomped on my tongue so fast and hard my eyes watered I sat in the backseat watched my eyes well up in the rearview mirror my heart beating in my hot mouth and wondered when it would stop hurting
Porcelain Skin Pornographers and casual skin fetishists can jerk it to the shav’ed skin of painted dolls of porcelain in glassy walls — and glaz’ed girls can wash away the china stains and hardened clay, expose their skin to air and sun to breath, relief and fur begun. You fools who seek a trophy for a wife can have the cheap knick-knacks all stain’ed gold to have and hold and let the gilded women stretch their arms and mouths out wide while flakes of gold and silver snow from folds and fingers. Gilded sisters flee and flock together, sharing tales of ways their spouses tried in vain to turn their insides solid metal, to lock them up in golden chains — and fools can have the concrete blow up doll of Aphrodite kept inside the velvet rop’ed jail and I will love the mortal soul who — though possessing healthy mind and means of crossing land and sea — has chosen time and time again to rest her mortal body next to me.
The Poem that Hurts I thought it was symbiosis but really you were my blood bag boyfriend a mosquito can’t even begin to know the body it sucks from besides that it is full of blood and warm I found you by your skin sweat sweet aroma, the scent of tender tender inexperience I found you the way a walking foot finds the ground It was something like love: part habit part choice part spending long hours together romanticising the inside of your car, romanticising the inside of each other’s mouths I didn’t feel hunger until I realized you could feed me I needed all the time your time to heal me, your ears to hear me your eyes see me your palms to calm me I didn’t feel despair until I realized you would soothe me We read histamine braille with playful hands the raised bumps, pink welts were my stamp on you — I had changed you into something new, given you me, taken you taken the you I knew by trial and entry, by trying to know me I didn’t feel needy until I realized you could leave me
I saw you making yourself bleed digging out scabs, eradicating every generation of skin I’d ever touched I felt for you something like love: part desperation part nausea part denial when you left me, you were all scar glimmer I couldn’t look you in the eyes I’ve looked for you everywhere in my blind way but your scent is somewhere else I thought I’d found you once but really I’d bumped into a sweatshirt and started feeding and choking on black thread fuzz what am I supposed to do without you ? I heard no reply —for months I was enraged every skin flake, scab piece every blood stain I found didn’t answer to your name every sock divorced from your feet didn’t answer to your name didn’t answer me a single thing all of the you in me was used up and gone and gone and gone had I ever known you? had we ever met? who were you other than what I could poke than what I could buzz into? I didn’t know me until you held me in your boundary I didn’t know me until I contoured you around me I found you by your scent I found me in the shape of you, removed
“how love seeps up and retakes the earth” After Kay Ryan the crust shifts and crumbles—a scalding orange ooze sighs its black ash cloud, and becomes dry molten rock the ash consumes lungs, kills entire towns, burns forests alive and then becomes the richest yolk for new life the way a thick root breaks concrete slabs into easter egg plastic—the way everything persists until it doesn’t the same way the sun will go out and most of space is dark, love wrecks and mends wrecks and mends, the land will exhale and ocean waves will unfold and scrub the rock to sand and salt and love will kill all of us before it births us better again
I revised “Hard Reset for Beginners,” “Porcelain Skin,” “The Poem that Hurts,” “‘how love seeps up and retakes the earth,’” “A Small Autobiography,” and “Third Date with a Girl I Met on Tinder.” I chose these poems to revise because I felt I had the best grasp on the content of these poems in comparison to others and I felt I had much more to say in them than what was said in the original drafts. The arrangement I chose was based on the continuum of emotion each poem provides. I started with “Hard Reset” as a sort of orientation or introduction for the reader and ended the series with “‘how love…’” in order to create a meditative, abstract transition in and out of the collection containing the more concrete inside. With “Hard Reset” and “Porcelain Skin,” I abandoned the metaphors that drove the originals in pursuit of another take on the essence of each. With both, I felt the core messages were of a different type than my originals conveyed; “Hard Reset” wanted to be more meditative and focused and “Porcelain Skin” wanted to be more political and biting. In revising both, I tried to understand the heart of what made each poem worth pursuing to me and let that drive my writing. In “Porcelain Skin” I also thought more about how using a rough variation on a traditional iambic form would make the meaning more dynamic and impactful. With “The Poem that Hurts,” “A Small Autobiography” and “Third Date,” I revised largely based on the feedback I received in workshop in order to strengthen clarity and narrative detail. Because all three poems are supplemented heavily with content and emotion from my own experiences, having feedback from objective readers helped me peel away the narratives from their real-life contexts to allow me to examine how they can stand on their own. I started to view the people in the poems as narrators and characters that I could manipulate to serve the meaning rather than me or people in my life. This helped me, again, hone in on what made these poems worth writing and reading. In all three, the focus of revision was the narration leading up to the conclusion. With each, I had arrived at an ending that was not resolved or not earned, so I thought about what could make the arrivals more substantial, logical results of the narration. I am proud and happy with my growth as a writer through this course. I have a better understanding of precision of thought and craft as well as a deeper sense of my own poetic voice and aesthetic than I did before. I learned that revision can be the exciting and powerful space where I come closer and closer to the product I had initially intended to make, or (more often) closer to a
better product than what I had intended. My writing process usually starts with a memory, an argument, or a statement and continues by trying on different words and forms to embody it. I would describe my aesthetic as vivid, reflective and tender. It’s still hard for me to start writing unless I have something clear and emotion-driven I need to convey, so am starting a daily practice of writing to generate content rather than waiting for something to piss me off enough to write about. I also want to work on creating content that is less tied to the specifics of my own life. Poetic form also interests me, specifically learning ways to work with form that take me out of my comfort zone.