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

[Hannah Roberts]

Gorgeous Allison!

On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 9:49 AM Robin Russin <robin.russin at ucr.edu> wrote:

> 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
> >
> > Thanks to Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021),
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