from Ars Poetica

I

When I was young, I realised my body
was something to be held back or kept
in its place, so I have mastered the art
of observation, how to watch faces for
a frown or grimace: signs of weather.
Once, a teacher came up to me in the
school playground and asked me if I
had any feelings. Your expression is
blank, she added. What could I say?
I knew how to dim any spark within.
Years later, I left home for the poem:
inscrutable house, constructed space,
blue room, how the poets have named
a heaven in which lonely meanings sit
companionably beside lonely children.

II

after Marie Howe

The novel feels like a springer spaniel running off-
leash the poem a warm basket it returns to always

As a teenager I learnt to minimize myself whenever
my mother’s face transformed into a furious sunset

What does it feel like to not have to hide things like
a small splinter of sadness or an even smaller need?

I work too well with constraints so I cannot enjoy
the sheer amount of space a prose writer deserves

My therapist says it has to do with my relationship
to freedom something I find just as trying as prose

I want my reader to understand my protagonist and
their feelings without my having to describe them in

detail the way a poet I adore once wrote about her
brother a gate and a cheese and mustard sandwich

I accept that I can’t comprehend the size or shape or
texture of the gate but I knew the shade of her grief

III

at twenty, you were as far                                        away from poetry
as you now are                                                                    from the sea
a man once                                                                   asked you where
you found grace                                               you told him in a poem

for years you thought                                                touch was the tap
running                                                                  your fingers braiding
the soft water                                                      or the shower spilling
incandescently                                                      over a shamed torso

at an airport in Texas                                   a barista playfully asked
if you were a professional                                                tennis player 
praising your shoulders                                                           you were
in transit to attend                                              a slam poetry contest

yet you felt seen somehow                              so you cleaved to that
small identity                                                                     all afternoon
comforted you had a place                               in that brutal country
that summer                                                            you returned home

as yourself                                                               then left once more
months later                                                        clutching a slim book
of poems close on the long                                    flight to New York
each word a warm hand                                                      to keep you

from the edge of things                                               each line a hum
to bring back                                                                     the hallelujah

IV 

They wrote: NONFICTION, then saved it
in a folder titled FICTION, then saved it
in a folder titled POETRY. This felt true.