Sometimes it is night inside the delicate skin of my body waiting to clarify
the dark shifting as I don’t know what to say again –
[Though let’s be honest, I like
the huge beating genius machine
Turned inward]
– shifting shape as a big dangerous animal out of this stream comes to me
simply: local symmetries, the scent of licorice, something to do
with the origins of blues and jazz glittering like pools of ink under moonlight.
Call it silence.
Eyes as round as dinner plates, the lady speaks a word.
Poet’s note: It seems every poem that sparks in my mind these days is trying to explain something about autistic selective mutism.
Last week, I participated in a cento workshop with Aura Martin through Belle Point Press. The highlight of the session was crafting a cento as a group; four of us who had never met read through a slew of poems swiftly, harvesting the lines that meant the most to us, and then in what felt like a poetic speed dating scenario (except beautiful and generative instead of terrifyingly soul-crushing), we crafted a poem together. The verses and the working-togetherness were beautiful.
This poem is what I created on my own from four poems Aura provided, linked below.1 It gets close to something I want to say. I love how leaning on others’ words can make something new and true of my own. As you can see from the title, this isn’t my first try on this topic. Maybe I’ll end up with a whole collection about what it feels like to need and get to be quiet—until I’m ready to speak.
In other poetry news, I am part of a collective seeking racial renewal and repair in my town, and I contributed a poem that ran last week: