from Wasp Ode
All the Stalactites Glittering Then Gone
from Wasp Ode
The Other
When a signal sent collided with a signal from the receiver,
the peaks and valleys could easily skew,
and all of the frequencies occurred at all the wrong times.
Therefore I had trouble understanding her, the girl from beyond.
But I always knew
the tap of the rhythm, learned it in my sleep, could reproduce
it without really understanding. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap.
A message like a mistake you make so many times
it becomes ritual rather than accident,
or something you appropriate into a private lexicon,
say, the eye of an iris, so bright and large
it comes to represent sorrow, or drowning.
A marble placed in the mouth.
When you look away it is once again iris.
All the Stalactites Glittering Then Gone
Something inside me has grown spindly, white, spiked. I overwater and rot; I water too little and stay okay for a long, long time.
To you I have been writing in my sleep. Somnambulant,
I float up against myself, a barrier.
Human, coelacanth,
I am trying to swim up through the dregs
out into whose fracturing gaze
*
One day, I realized I’d wasted my life. I felt like a dead girl waking up. I didn’t know how I’d swum through time, not skimming a bit of debris on the surface, to reach this aperture. And I thought I heard someone crying…
In my head was a procession of girls whose mouths were opening into inscrutability, their skin scratched beyond all photogenics
They were all living in the interior of some bit of time,
unfurled like a thicket of dark marks
scrawled by someone trying to say, — , —
as another person sent back a thicket, inscrutable.
They were scratching deeper
into the knit of —, — to find something like home
*
I dug into my skin to find a thorn/ a tangled bit of code
embedded
and beyond all unraveling
*
Look. You should know this. You were there.
In every scratch, every letter, I sent to you some emblem. Like maybe one day we—me and those other girls and non-girls—all arrived in this world, warm and striving, trying to dig our way into some totally polished silence. And from there, eventually, we stir, we want to talk to somebody, anybody who will understand.
Here it is. The things I could not say. The things I could not mean. You know what I mean to say. In my chest there is a star.
All the Stalactites Glittering Then Gone comes from an ongoing series of epistolary poems, from different speakers to an addressee (addressees) named XX. I wanted to convey… feeling like you are held captive by something urgent but being unable to communicate it—either to yourself or an “other”—for personal and structural reasons. And trying to use the poetic form to break and re-create all bonds.
For the Wasp Ode sequence, I envisioned two women who lived in parallel universes. They are aware of each others’ presence but are unable to directly communicate, and therefore speak in alternating monologues to the reader.
Sharon Wang’s poems can be found in journals including Blackbird, DIAGRAM, The Volta, Tupelo Quarterly, The Pinch, and The Antioch Review. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis’ MFA, she currently lives in Queens, NY and has just completed a web development bootcamp.