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

[Robin Russin]

What a heart-rending poem, what amazing imagery…wow.

Thanks for sharing this.

Robin

On Mar 20, 2023, at 11:25 PM, Jainlight <jainlight at mindspring.com> wrote:


Allison, this is stellar from the opening stanza. Kudos.

www.SteveErickson.org <http://www.steveerickson.org/>



> On Mar 20, 2023, at 8:27 PM, Alejandra Castillo Chavez <acast241 at ucr.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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 Support Poem-a-Day
> March 20, 2023 
> Description of Symptoms Allison Benis White 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.
> Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast     “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
> Allison Benis White 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.
> 
> The Wendys
> (Four Way Books, 2020)
> 
> 
> “A Horse Grazes in My Shadow” by Mat Rasmussen
> read more
> “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity” by Mary Jo Bang
> read more
> 
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