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

[Alejandra Castillo Chavez]

So good! Thank you for sharing! Congratulations to professor Allison Benis
White.

-Ale

On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 6:08 PM Allison Hedge Coke <allisonh at ucr.edu> wrote:

> "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
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=efcbb59356&e=9de57db1a5>
> *Allison Benis White*
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=271186dff0&e=9de57db1a5>
>
> 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*
> [image: Allison Benis White]
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=4114bcdf09&e=9de57db1a5>
>
> Allison Benis White
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=02bb344e79&e=9de57db1a5>
> 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.
>
>
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=531b8dde42&e=9de57db1a5>
> [image: The Wendys]
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=6c4892b334&e=9de57db1a5>
>
> *The Wendys*
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=4ae0f638ed&e=9de57db1a5>
> (Four Way Books, 2020)
>
>
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=fd2d5e9ec8&e=9de57db1a5>
>
>
>
> *“A Horse Grazes in My Shadow” by Mat Rasmussen*
> *read more*
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=aa5627c3fb&e=9de57db1a5>
> *“The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity” by Mary Jo Bang*
> *read more*
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> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=d0678fd923&e=9de57db1a5>
> Thanks to Diane Seuss
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> author of *frank: sonnets
> <https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=fca230d7fc&e=9de57db1a5> *(Graywolf
> Press, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or
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