“I very much wanted the experience of the poem to be a wash of language, with many words seeming to be suggested by, or reflected off of, what comes before them. I suppose the poem is somewhat mimetic of its own notions, where history and heritage are odd glints coming at the waiting consciousness rather than originating from it, like reflections rather than sources of light. I’d been thinking about the narratives, or shaped histories, that are in place long before any individual’s arrival on the scene. And I wondered in this particular poem how the self’s formation might be intensified (or thwarted?) by the accidents, or destinies, of a mixed-race heritage (or at least, a sense that one’s parents, in my case, come from very different cultural zones). Then, I wound up adding how one’s inner life is also made contingent by our various life stages. The poem ends on a more assertive note, a kind of mini-manifesto that wobbles, I hope, between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek.”
—Pimone Triplett