The Poetry Project

POETRY

Imani Elizabeth Jackson

When we talk about history and the archive, we are
defending the dead. I have to imperil myself to write
these encounters with nothing.

Women often make their bodies vehicles. Women often
attempt to embody archives or be them. I am to hazard
this journey, countering the violence of abstraction.

It’s the romance of resistance that I refuse to narrate.
Anti-monument. I’m always bent to the present,
psychic recollections of a past that is present.

These absences or losses are windows
that haunt, the landscape itself a witness.
Lifeworlds hoed in reaped ripped up from the fields.
There are signs that suggest a haunting.

#256 — October/November 2018

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