DO YOU HAVE A GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION?
by Carlina Duan
— and remember the time I stood at the intersection
carrying my black suit of hair and the woman stopped in
her shiny car, rolled down the window to scream something
vulgar something clanking inside her mouth a word a system
of grammar flipped to fury red ripe railing at me?
for what? my body? my attention?
Anger is often in response to a boundary crossed…
what was that boundary? where were my legs? why did
I stand there, without a word, holding the straw in my ice
cubed drink as the liquid turned warm & illegible between
these jaws? slosh,
slosh,
the woman stopped in her shiny car.
the woman stopped to scream “_______ !”
“_________ ! You __________________!”
in her shiny car
at me.
Who is the subject of this sentence? Who is the object? What is the verb?
Standard English Grammar dictates… the proper tense.
do I care about the proper?
she spat at me. she said a bad word. a string of words demarcating
my body (hit by grammar, hit by a field of letters, hid behind a lump in my throat while my body remained my body, my lungs pulled up
the hot July air, my hair remained parted to the side as I clasped
the straw as I watched the tips of my feet) a body to be screamed
at by a stranger. July, North American. a street.
Which tense would you like to use to describe the incident above?
(the past) the future.
I will eat leaves and pour vinaigrette
slow & skinny. I will feed the low opal of my mouth. in times of
distress, I will turn on the stove. garlic will be fried in a river
of yellow oil. I will eat my letters, crunchy and fat. angry
and swollen, soft and slathered in old fashioned oats, I will
try to pull up the words:
Hit me she did. Hurt me I am.
Language she did.
The word __________________ I am.
am not.
on a North American street, on a hot
July day, a woman stopped her car
where I waited at an intersection to
tell me I was a __________________ .
on a North American street, on a hot
July day, a woman stopped her car
where I waited at an intersection
to scream the word __________________ !
and later, I wilted leaves in a hot pan.
and later, I fed the story back
to my mouth. and later, the syntax
was rewound in a reel, set aside,
and I composed a new body
of roman letters out
my body— I pulled up words
from their waggling roots
and raised them to touch
the edges of a face, a page,
to cure and hold and praise
and wriggle and snap and sister
and (alive!) amen
and (alive!) amen
then defy and defy and talk back.
back to University & College Poetry Prizes