statement of poetics (part 2)

These poems are bodies and there is not just one way in or through. Bones are not all shaped the same, so why should poems be? Approach poetics as you would, skin. There is a hesitance, a whispered peek, a flirt of dissection, a rummage of sensation and texture.

These poems challenge form.

One is an index.

One is a dialogue between two voices finding their way in and out of each other.

There is a letter to a breast that haunted [a] fear of cancer; this tiny note is a response to an exhale of health.

There is an investigation of what may become extinct.

There is prose that touches on the entanglement of new love and thievery of muscular, metaphor’d heart.

If I removed all my clothes, would my nudity stand up for me?

If I explained all these poems in slow-motion footnotes and historical implications, would you understand what I really mean by: blue jaws travel[ing] between the moon and an ambulance? Or too late to intervention a grey skeleton shifting into hazel and charcoal and drown.

If Pollack were still alive to stand beside me at Museum of Modern Art and explain to me the origin of his drips, I would ask him for silence. There is a need to shackle the disclaimer and allow a poem to stain a page and digest the reader toward some kind of stir.

There is a poem encapsulated in collapsible framework used by nomads.

There is a cemetery of loss in the poem written during that time someone infiltrated my bedroom and stole all my photographs.

And that poem called abandon refers to the way a flower may weep once petals get plucked just for counting out love’s declarations.

I’ve been told I write about the body too much and what else can I say. How about I measure out the other discourses inside me not as native as my tongue to see what else forms.

I respond: it’s like telling skin to try shifting into another color. Or like suggesting to shave away the curves in one’s voice and choose another pitch. It’s like asking memories to switch channels. Pollack’s drips knew exactly where they’d run off to and these words emanate from the sermons solidifying inside me.

There is a poem which disembowels the shadow and how to locate the soul in each one.

So locate the scars and smell the aroma of translation. All of this is a necessity. It is no longer about choice. These poems reveal urgency and are meant to perform. I will travel. I will nude and transliterate. I will blur and I will queer. I will write because I must.