Prompt: Sometimes, writing poetry is a matter of getting outside of your own head, and learning to see the world in a new way. To an extent, you have to “derange” yourself – make the world strange, and see it as a stranger might. To help you do that, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by this animated version of “Seductive Fantasy” by Sun Ra and his Arkestra.
Watching the video and its surreal animation made me think of upside-down worlds and surreal things, like the news, and how things seem to disappear these days - things like me, like missing women and dead women, because as an Asian woman, it seems like I'm a *thing* to most people.
Day 1: Bottoms Up
i see life from the bottom of a glass looking up
full empty it doesn’t matter everything distorts even air
gravity is a downward-falling lasso
what grows downward are the bodies of the dead
free-falling spread-eagled onto a blip of consciousness
blip we see you blip we don’t blip you are viruses
blip you are the invisible dead
women who could have been my aunties
corpses elongating into tentacles into creepers into roots
my landlady giving advice on ovarian cysts
our laundromat owner her orchid-bloom smile
extending downward at the corners
a bloody mustache of smeared lipstick and stopped wails
i see life from the bottom of a glass full of words strangled at birth
silence is an eraser
full empty it doesn’t matter everything distorts even air
gravity is a downward-falling lasso
what grows downward are the bodies of the dead
free-falling spread-eagled onto a blip of consciousness
blip we see you blip we don’t blip you are viruses
blip you are the invisible dead
women who could have been my aunties
corpses elongating into tentacles into creepers into roots
my landlady giving advice on ovarian cysts
our laundromat owner her orchid-bloom smile
extending downward at the corners
a bloody mustache of smeared lipstick and stopped wails
i see life from the bottom of a glass full of words strangled at birth
silence is an eraser
4 comments:
Wishing you a speedy recovery. It's good to read you again. Beautiful poem though I know it comes from pain. Do take care.
This is so beautiful, Shuku, so moving. "everything distorts even air" is an amazing line, and so is the "glass full of words strangled at birth." Feel better soon, dear friend.💜
Yay! YOu're back! Posted a link to your site on my website - I'll take it down right away, if you prefer. Stunning: our laundromat owner her orchid-bloom smile
extending downward at the corners
a bloody mustache of smeared lipstick and stopped wails"
Looking forward to see what you write next!
Devastating poem, Shuku. I love how you work with the falling, spouting, tentacle-reaching imagery in the video to say something so urgent and necessary. Most of us seem to have gone in a goofy, surface direction with the prompt, but you really embraced the invitation to shake up thinking. I feel shaken reading this, in the best way. Couldn't be happier to read your work and see you back!
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