Jen R.’s Reviews > With My Back to the World: Poems > Status Update

It was so hot that I forgot to read my depression into everything. That day, I brought a daughter with me. We spent the day so close to each other's unhappiness that they began to smear together into a new form. Seven months later, I have cut eight lines off of this poem for no other reason except that they were lies. Perhaps all lines are lies.

The only way to see if my words are poems is if I crush them into lines. I do this so no one can see my insides. I've learned that the words are only poems if, when flattened into a line, the meaning is still there. In my need to know, I am surrounded by lines. Even a river is no longer water but a series of lines that sounds like a stream.

If I give too much away, it's not the heart that is depleted but the eyes with all the noticing. My eyes used to take up my entire head. Now they are two dots. It will take a year for them to grow back. But when they do, they will no longer be able to move.

My error was to become what I wanted to be, not its tone. The words, not their cutting.

I sit and wait for the floor to speak to me. But it just acts like a floor. The floor never testifies on my behalf even though it has felt everything.

I left my sight over there. I still see the lightning, even days later. On some nights, I am so below the line that I leave my breathing outside by accident. By the time I realize it, all the horses have taken my breathing and run off. For once, I am not being chased by my own language. The horses are surprised to have speech, but die within an hour of using it.

Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made up of lines. It's hard to say when these lines were no longer just themselves. The minute Agnes put the brush to the canvas, they became indescribable. The sayable, by nature, is an elegy. The unsayable, outside of time. What we say, here, now, is only the part of flesh that is known.

How to reconcile the fact that I want to make art but don't want to be criticized. That I want to be loved but I don't want to open my mouth. That I want to be saved but I don't want to kneel down. Pessoa said, In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

At this hour, a line is the thing with a human face. There is no hope in shapes. There is just the line and the sound of its scratch as it crosses out memory. Perhaps it's not memory we're trying to capture, but everything instead of it.

I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart. The sensation of being strangled, not the hands around my neck.