Nejma

our tragedy begins humid.
in a humid classroom.
with a humid text book. breaking into us.
stealing us from ourselves.
one poem. at a time.

it begins with shakespeare.

the hot wash.
the cool acid. of
dead white men and women. people.

each one a storm.

crashing. into our young houses.
making us islands. easy isolations.
until we are so beleaguered and
swollen
with a definition of poetry that is white skin and
not us.
that we tuck our scalding. our soreness.
behind ourselves and
learn
poetry.
as trauma. as violence. as erasure.
another place we do not exist.
another form of exile
where we should praise. honor. our own starvation.

~Nayyirah Waheed

Ode to a Nightingale

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To they high requiem become a sod.

~John Keats

The Argonauts

At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it.

~Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

I learned this scorn from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people's needs as repulsive. Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.

~Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

~Maggie Nelson

Why Poetry

I think if we are being honest, we probably would admit that at times we fear there is an unbridgeable gap between us and others--readers, friends, family, partners--that language cannot cross. Or maybe we fear the gap is in fact bridgeable by someone less damaged or more talented or attractive or authentic than ourselves. To cross this gap is the dream of all writers, and that dream is a kind of metonymy of the human dream to cross over into intimacy or connection.

~Matthew Zapruder

The Argonauts

In Arabic, the word for fetus derives from jinn, which means "hidden from sight." No matter how many ultrasounds you've had, no matter how well you feel you've gotten to know your baby's rhythms in utero, the baby's boy is still a revelation. A body! An actual body!

~Maggie Nelson