I come from the sea./ From the mountains where the wild onions grow./ From the orbit/ [of] my mother’s womb: [/]a dangerous territory/ wide and rushing/ [like] a great poet. And I opened to that blankness/ [like] an ear.
Excerpt from Vertical Answers: AROHO 2013 [remixed by Bhanu Kapil]
“the conch” by Anonymous
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Here I am: the kind of woman
who slakes a thirst no longer dry,
casts pins to the wind though
nothing sticks to air.
I am black coal squeezed a lifetime.
My eyes diamond light.
I cannot look away,
wear you on my hand.
Your smile beamed photons
the night when the mercury
slithered like a black snake,
a night whose edge is never lost.
The wind comes in gusts of passion
haunted by ghosts; distance is irrelevant.
I am not dreaming, yet there are
trillions of miles—prowlers in an alien land.
Somewhere, someone drifts into sleep.
But dreams are not the only way of knowing.
I am dancing in moonface.
You do not know me this way.
Listen! You can almost hear the roar
of blood building a reef no tide can cross.
With each dry fall of a coconut,
we gaze fruitlessly at the plump sky.
As if dreams had meaning, as if gravity
didn’t exist, as if answers had a name.
Toward dawn, you can hear them as if lost in sleep.
The wind howls like a woman in love.
It is the heart beating through the night,
but there are complications:
Silence turned into thunder.
Words are no longer enough.
Have we become at last no more
than fractal images forming and reforming?
There always was something wrong in your brain,
some break in the synaptic pattern.
Once I used to type on an old Underwood.
Now my fingers stroke a keyboard.
I envision they fall like snow,
speaking a language long since gone to pebble.
This is for you and you and you.
I don’t like to remember, but to dream
is to surrender, give in and be lost
to love’s oblivious beauty.
I have waited a long time
in rainy orchards,
in spiral books where you are
what you were—I’m what I’ve become.
The only thing I’m sure of is the night sky.
One way or another we’re collapsing,
an empty space roiling its false calm.
Like you and I sizzling in the dark
“What I’ve Become (A Cento All My Own)” by Barbra Nightingale
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she began to think of herself as a vessel, an organic container, a vesicle. a fluid-filled tube crafted of ancient earth and its ancestors. pictured herself stretching from mycelian roots, reaching, willing, growing toward the star mothers who live light years above, the future entangled in the now. imagined that we were each these self-same multicellular these organic connections, like budding obelisks, draped between extremes as if she could hear the bustle of this community like neural networks transmuting and thrumming with the dark and feral knowings of the universe.
“she began to think of herself as a vessel” by Carrie Nassif
“Quilting My Mothers” by Karen Henninger
_________________________________________________________
I’d already mastered chopsticks
you’d already freed
my tongue
from its cloister
coaxing it to say
yú for the first time
while we ate—
Taipei night
slurping marrow
you performed Bopomofo
explaining
even with your teeth
how to say
fish
let the tongue lie
quiet as soy
let the ginger
open, only then—
will it bend for you
in parse in tandem
we made sounds
for the first time
a new pronunciation
“How to Say Fish” by Shari Zollinger
_________________________________________________________
The waves have taken me out to sea many times,
I thought but didn’t say.
And its always thrown me back
A different shape.
. . .
They were present.
In the sea and water.
In the gleam of a sunset
In storm and drought.
They were the anchor in a story
Made of pebbles and dirt and earth.
Before sight and speech.
Enviably old, I begin again
I cross into the current
I walk into the sea.
I am-I say, I am-
Older than this
This story
Myself.
I am-
“The Vigil” by Dipika Guha, from Waves: A Confluence of Women’s Voices
What echoes through you that longs to take form—a poem, an image, a mark, a whisper of becoming?
