The Poetry Project

Epicentral

Sarah Sarai

Here’s what I free-wrote in our class session. It’s a little raw but aren’t we all.
Shout-out to Group 4.

Journey to the center of the map.
The body as barrier.
Gerrymander the heart.
So not everyone has equal access.
Map the fence surrounding your center.
Journey to the midpoint of the fence.
You can squeeze between posts.
They’re still on the map.
Not the aerial view. Some creative perspective.
Virgil is taking your hand.
You shake him off.
Life’s about finding your own way.
But the map.
Imagine my index finger bright blue.
I twirl digits as a compass
mappin’ a way to Brokeback Mountain.
I am mapping the tragic,
the irrefutably sad. I am mapping sadness,
drawing a negotiable boundary.
You, boundary-draw-er of paper-daisy-girls
unfolding like a good haiku
or origami to discourage invention.
You, boundary draw-er.
I wonder how safe you feel.
If I step inside your boundary are you safer.
I’m less so inside your boundary.
If I jump out of the circle are you
satisfied you are epicentral.
Why don’t theorists step up their writing.
Hip-hop is invention and release.
Wherever I am, working to bring down the curtain.
And yet there is an East River.
How does this everything happen?
Why this burden of emotion.
I am mapping love.

May 14, 2020

Work from “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping

Elsewhere