“Ask Me How it Happened” – Embodied Poem (excerpts)

When I visited Lisbon during the Disquiet International Program, I had the opportunity to attend Terri Witek’s course, “The Pessoa Game,” based on the works of Fernando Pessoa and the concept of Writing in the Expanded Field.

“Ask Me How It Happened” – visual poem, lines written on the body in places corresponding to sites of past & scars

During a section on mapping, I completed the visual version of the poem “Ask Me How It Happened,” originally published via SOFTBLOW. In 2013, this embodied poem was the recipient of a Michael R. Gutterman Award for poems exemplifying “the new, the unusual, and the radical,” adjudicated by the University of Michigan’s Hopwoods Program.

Each line of the poem was written on portions of my body, mapping the origins of scars, photographed, and then worn throughout the day as I made my way through the city.

visual piece excerpts

Ask Me How It Happened

There are ways to explain a lack
of warmth, rasp, tickle, absent
from the alienated limb. The fish knife

slices to bone through tender nerves
on the left side of the tarsal. Weight
like horse hooves, or granite—in my case,

composites of shale—compress, shear,
press into translucence, the skin
black and purple and bone-yellow, and

dead. There is nothing between
surface and interior, there is nothing
but pain and then: nothing, numb

in concentric circles from the wound.
My left knee with its moonfaced scar
can’t feel you, dear, yes, even now, even

when you press hard with a single pin.

“Ask Me How it Happened” – Embodied Poem (excerpts)

visual piece excerpts

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