Tuesday, October 09, 2012

With my nails, teeth, a thread

Amidst last-minute extra work for Asao's tour, phone calls, medical bills that insurance rejected, audiobooks retrieved for next week's drive to and from Ohio, leftover carrot cake from seeing Terttu last night (she's the one who did the cover photography for my book), artwork shipped back from a show, a teaching invitation, and figuring out what kind of paper to use in a conference demo, I had to stop for a moment to read something NOT on a computer screen.

Sometimes I think poets are born and named and then HAVE to be poets, because their names are so beautiful. I wanted to share a snippet of a poem by Aracelis Girmay in her latest book, Kingdom Animalia. That cover artwork captivates me completely.

This is a bit of the middle of "Portrait of the Woman as a Skein" with an epigraph by Erin Molitor that reads, I lost my hands—
Sometimes you leave your hair at the bus station
& get on the bus.

Sometimes you leave your hair at the bus station
& get on the bus & as your face falls asleep against the window
you realize it is all your body now, everything between you
& the pieces you lost once, the towers & crows,
the city (you) gleaming
in long, glorious hyphen
beneath stars.

Sometimes you are a broken barn.
Sometimes you are the street & trees.
Sometimes a spool of purple string.

You are a colander, sometimes
losing things.

Sometimes what keeps you alive is a mystery.

5 comments:

Velma Bolyard said...

oh, that's amazing!

Velma Bolyard said...

the book!!! and the poem, both amazing.

ellenm said...

the cover of the book is beautiful!!!

onesmallstitch said...

when is the book available? I love that last line "Sometimes what keeps you alive is a mystery".

aimee said...

thank you! i am so lucky to have been able to pull that cover off. it was a great feat of friendship and camera and design skills. the book will be available in cleveland starting on wednesday, but online orders, i'm not sure yet. you'll be the first to know here, though!