Ghosts I Count (excerpt)
This manuscript explores themes of female identity, family constellations, heritage, love, and war, while also examining the limitations and possibilities of language. Written in longform (epic), the poem takes the premise of a muse who discovers her own agency within the poem, meditating on the role of the artist in relation to their subject. As the voice of the muse becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the author’s, an autobiographical dimension emerges, whereby the muse is instilled with subjectivity, a commentary on how muses have been dehistoricized and depoliticized as vehicles to produce art.
War chases war in the quietude,
just as birth burns despite the body’s exhaustion
Childbirth is our battle Spero finger-painted
on a pennant I return to
in the seventh hour
where the body expels itself
Standing in the clearing of my own making
where the barefooted muse
asks what dislocated hour wakes me?
In this eerie stillness where we are but phantoms
will the poet’s mural endure the nightmare
of a decimated now, where mothers beget children underground
as the foliage cedes to occupation
and the wind is a prisoner in its native land
Our hearts are tentacles transmitting light
she says, language impregnates earth
and we are all children spurred from dirt
We wake inside a gasoline dream
and yet we carry the hazelnut between our breasts
I was born into the century of suffering
I was carried in on the ailerons of verse
I was carried out on the pine's lowly dirge