Experiment in Text: Unsummoned

I think I was drawn to this image because it is so NOT of the season (I guess that's not entirely true....Hanukkah is "The Festival of Lights," so "The Festival of Pyrotechnics" is just one cognitive door down...). I do like imagining this as a holiday card, though...

A very happy holidays to you, whatever it is that you celebrate! I hope you are enjoying the people and things that you love!

(The text in the image above is from "Unsummoned,"---here is the full text.)

Audio: Unsummoned

For Multimedia Friday, I have audio of my poem, "Unsummoned." The image that inspired this poem is a photo I took at WWE's Summer Slam 2010 (yes, really). Wrestling is fascinating to me in terms of performance and identity--and I find it interesting that people so quickly dismiss it by saying, "You know it's not real, right?" While the wrestlers are indeed portraying characters and enacting scripted story lines, the movements of the wrestlers are completely real (and undeniably athletic). It's a bit like dance---choreographed and scripted, and requiring training and skill.

The word "wrestling" made it through to this poem, but otherwise, you won't see any fireworks or spandex or signs held up by the crowd. Hope you enjoy it!

Unsummoned by The Storialist

Unsummoned

Unsummoned

Fires singe your lashes and arm hair.
The pigment beneath your scalp flees.
Names bubble from you, unsummoned.

Your spine buckles, a tendon snaps.
Seismic disturbances lurk in this mud,
in our anatomy. Sure, we own the land

we live on, the body that we pilot out
into the potholed terrain of time.
Cells halve and double. Blades slice skin,

blood surging out like a choir, like oil.
Almost none of experience needs
your consent. Wrestle that to the floor

and clutch it against your chest, and
remember our planet, how no one asked
it if the moon could latch on.