Powerlessness
By KT Herr
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I thought I had exhausted all my metaphors: various prey; coins
inserted slant, jamming vending machines; cartoon hand over cartoon
mouth. I studied grim histories of hysterical patients, listened
to accounts of fish who change their sex to breed. I thought I knew all
there is to know about glass: a viscous liquid forced to acquiesce
to rigidity. If I could learn the posture well enough I’d know
how to unlearn it. I practiced exhaustively. I’m practicing now,
today, as I sit smoking. Next door, workmen are lowering a warped
slab of half-inch plywood from the building’s distant roof. Above, one rotates
a winch while below another gathers slack, taming the spent plywood’s
wild twists. A third man stands, watches the rough plank pirouette past
several
windows, bracing to receive the spinning scrap. You think I’m telling you
the story of the plank; how it feels to be trussed, grappled over. But I
am the third man: waiting for some purpose to come into my hands.KT Herr (they/she) is a queer writer, stepparent, and curious person with recent work appearing in Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and as winner of the 2023 American Literary Review Award in Poetry, among others. KT is a Four Way Books board member, a poetry editor at Gulf Coast, and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in critical poetics at the University of Houston.
04/10 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Chloe Martinez and local poet Ximena Gómez / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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