Impressions from Four Days at CUPSI

I heard more spoken word poetry in four days than I am ever likely to hear again in such a condensed period of time. Spoken word is exhausting and invigorating at the same time, and almost two weeks after the event it’s hard to form my thoughts into a coherent column.

In sports jargon, I guess you could say that Harvard’s preliminary bouts at College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational were intense—two of the teams we went up against in first rounds went on to finals. We challenged the audience with our poetry, we fought hard and practiced a lot, and after hearing a lot of emotional poems, the first-place title went to the well-deserving University of Texas-Austin. But in the end, CUPSI is so much more than a report of scores. I learned again and again how silly it is to slap numbers onto art.

So I’d like to share a poem with you. I wrote it as a way to collect my own thoughts about competitive poetry and human interaction over the four days our team spent in Boulder, Colo. It’s messy and meandering, but so are people. It’s tough to write poetry for performance—as soon as it’s out there, the goal of the poem becomes convincing listeners of your intent and your poetic skill rather than working through an idea in stanzas. So you can read this one to yourself. And no need score me on it.

Apology

I wrote a poem on the palm of my hand

But it washed off in the shower.

I think it had something to do with the recklessness I collected

From bus seat windows.

Somehow it had to do with itchy fabric seats.

It was about the spot of yogurt on the corner of your mouth,

The whitish blotch you cannot see.

It was about that, somehow.

Or maybe it had something to do with drinking a scorpion bowl

Collectively from colored straws

And not minding the sickly backwash

Because we were all going to get mono anyway.

I used to carry tiny plastic babies in my pockets,

I think because I liked the way they made my hands feel like mothers.

For once, I’m sure the poem on my palm had nothing to do with my mother.

I think the poem had something to do with camels

And how their fifth knee is located on their stomachs,

And of course it had something to do with the immortal jellyfish

Who is constantly aging and turning into a polyp of itself to be reborn

In the next deep-sea wave.

Somehow, everything I ever write on my palm is a fact about an animal,

Even email addresses I etch onto my skin are somehow stand-ins

For the regeneration of earthworms.

I can never seem to get any deeper than pen markings on palms—

Even here, on this plane, I can only speak in tidbits.

I want to tell you my hands are mothers

Even when they are hidden in my pockets, manufacturing sweat to rub off the

Mimicry of tattoos I am too afraid to truly carve into my baby pink placeholders.

Maybe if I tell you about my human heart and how it compares to the holy heart

Of a giraffe, then you will show me that your body is as basic as a giant squid.

Now that I think of it, that poem

Was probably about snowflakes and how they form their shapes

Based on unique microclimates they pass through

On their way down to this lonely earth.

In an airplane, ice crystals on the windows are examples of the beautiful imperfect.

All our bodies are on the outsides of airplane windows and yet

I have never held more than a plastic replica of an airplane in my hand.

I want to tell you that the reason my face is red

Is because it is a vestigial simulation of vulnerability—

There is no reason for me to display this color.

I am not sea coral.

I have no reason to announce my poisonous flesh.

I never wanted to write you into a poem

And maybe that’s why it got washed off in the shower.

I’m sorry if I’ve turned you into a regurgitated fact of my life.

Hopefully I have covered you with enough undetached rabbit parts

That you will not pick up on the image of you I have scratched into my finger.

All bodies are perfect attempts at humanity, but I know yours

Was so much more painful to forge.

I could never talk clearly about attraction anyway.

I want to unironically call you a snowflake,

And maybe if I reduce you to an unmeltable marvel

This will give me permission to cradle you in my palms

To learn the microclimates that formed you,

Just as I want you to learn my unironic mother hands.