Thank you to The Mackinac journal for publishing my poem unconfirmed liner notes.
This poem is loosely based on one of Vera Pavlova’s poems:
A tentative bio
A tentative bio:
caught fireflies,
read till dawn,
fell in love with weirdos,
cried buckets of tears
for reasons unknown,
birthed two daughters
by seven men.
I thought about introductions and ways in which we reveal ourselves to others. What we keep in and what we keep to ourselves. When I desire another, I am often quite silent, searching for the right words….often landing me in a pile of incomplete sounds. I loved the way in which Vera created magic in her bio. I especially love the line: fell in love with weirdos, which I can definitely attest to as well. But……aren’t they the best ones to love?
Here is my version.
unconfirmed liner notes
survived winter
grew an affection for quinoa
rode highways of stripped concrete and pothole’d sing-a-longs
came out as human
crashed a funeral & kissed a woman with a fetish for teardrops and soil
confessed to manslaughter of seventeen lightning bugs
drove sharpened syllables into the bend of my wrist and ate from the wound that remained
experimented with curry, collarbones and cough syrup
choked
fell out of windows and love
peeled keratin from hair and learned how to chew without teeth
read excerpts of dictionaries and fondled the cover of Ulysses
bartered for therapy
subscribed to trauma and the New York Times
called odd
miscarried sentences
broke recipes
inhaled several bad decisions
got bangs
learned how to play percussion off starved ribcage
called my mother a liar
called my knees disturbed
grew an allergy to February
wore a dress
photographed loneliness but ran out of batteries
traveled to the red light district
carved my name into several park rangers
contracted several unspeakable viruses
donated blood
took a nap
misplaced my gender
drove through a stop sign on a Sunday
Aimee Herman 