To measure internal activity while it turns all I know to rubble
By Rusty Morrison

I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen

from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible,

it begins to attack everything else I know.

Giorgio Agamben says devastation is one face of a Genius

that exists inside us. The other face is creation.

The two sounds that begin and end “dead” echo in my ears.

Then a third appears between them. The middle sound, between

the coronal plosives of the letter d, is the ghost.

Agamben tells us that the Genius is within us only as long as

we realize it does not belong to us. Just as existence does not.

Now I begin to voice only the ghost, and watch it ‘not appear.’

Is the narrow space between my Genius’s two faces

where that ghost lives? When I listen for what will not appear,

I hear my own voicelessness amplify.

My hearing is most acute when I’m naked

in front of the bedroom mirror.

I want voicelessness to create an echoing hollow

inside every word I type.

I feel how listening to find disappearances makes my nipples erect.

Disappearance is my new self-seduction.

---

“I was dealing with the death of someone close. My feelings were complicated, leaving me exhausted. But something in me shifted when reading Giorgio Agamben. He freed me from grieving, allowing me to find a fierceness—a fierceness that asked me to plunge into this moment, then the next, to dive into everything changing. The poem took time to finish. I was standing in front of my mirror, as I describe, when I opened to see the many selves I am disappearing, as I asked myself who I am. Then I wrote the last lines, or the poem wrote them for me.”
—Rusty Morrison

Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison is the copublisher at Omnidawn. She has authored several poetry collections, including Risk (Black Ocean, 2024) and Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. The recipient of fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, Civitella Ranieri, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Morrison lives in Richmond, California.

https://mailchi.mp/poets/september-02-2024-poemaday-12138304-331miebijr-12140576?e=2706955217

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