[Crwt-undergrad-info] Fwd: "Description of Symptoms" by Allison Benis White

[Allison Hedge Coke]

 "Description of Symptoms" by Allison Benis White Poem-a-Day | Poets.org


Now my hands buried / in my hair, resting on piano keys
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March 20, 2023
Description of Symptoms
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*Allison Benis White*
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Now my hands buried
in my hair, resting on piano keys
in the back of my head.
This is the music I am playing
through my mind: a dark room singing
a song that will not have children.

*

Lying on the floor tonight, snowflakes
cut from paper laid over my eyes, a hand
carved from wood laid over my mouth.
If the truth is the thing you must not say,
I will speak for the vase now
as it falls: it is better never
to be at all.

*

A hand on the back of my head
made of glass, my love, my eyes,
filled with wire, life. Once
I watched a bird’s shadow cross a field
in the wind: a black hat that could not stop
tumbling. My eyes are sore
from seeing, my lips from speaking.

*

How a ribbon curls when pulled
across a scissor’s blade, I am practicing
transformation, pain. How the dark hair
of imagination, uncut, grows down
to the floor. What is left
but to make a world, a war?


*

Or a landscape in which to stay alive
*(ghost flower/house of breath*). Another wish: language
drilled through ice, through my life.
If grief is love with nowhere to go, this is
my mouth turning into snow.
This is somewhere.

Copyright © 2023 by Allison Benis White. Originally published in Poem-a-Day
on March 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
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“This poem was written after filling out medical intake forms for a
doctor’s appointment last year. I was grieving for a friend who had ended
her life, and I was experiencing symptoms I could not quite articulate. The
poem surprised me with its ending, reminding me that language is a place
for love to go.”
*—Allison Benis White*
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Allison Benis White
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is the author of *The Wendys *(Four Way Books, 2020) and *Please Bury Me in
This* (Four Way Books, 2017), winner of the Rilke Prize. The recipient of
the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she
is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside.

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*The Wendys*
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(Four Way Books, 2020)

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