Exposition
Each new arrival walks into an incomplete fiction.
The meaning of the work is fragmentary. The story
has begun with a driving question: “What is the
function of diagnosis?” or “What can be made out
of loneliness?” Lauren is very elaborate and writes,
“What is the meaning of an accumulation of coffee
pots?” When asked to identify a yoke, she says,
“Thing you put around an ox—noose.” Lauren
withdraws, stops doing her homework, and hangs
shards of scenery: jigsaw puzzles, broken cameras,
decrees. All the characters are happenstance and
helium. All the dialogue is conditional. When asked
to identify a tourniquet, she answers, “a
blood-pressure thingie,” testifying to a life now
reduced on the Suicide Potential Scale. Lauren also
endorses the phrase, “I wish I could be as happy as
others seem to be.” She sits inside a viewfinder while
the horizon scans her brain for fires. The sky sags
into a blue body cast. What is the meaning of a
mountain of masks?
Copyright © 2023 by Lauren Russell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 24, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“When I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in March of 2020 at age thirty-six, I received a new narrative through which to understand my life and my loneliness. I also began interrogating diagnosis as narrative, while locked within the loneliness of the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Exposition’ includes material from a psychological evaluation assessing my ‘level of functioning’ the summer I turned fifteen, as well as language from Ted Castle’s article on the artist Arman, “Accumulation by Arman,” from the December 1983 issue of Art in America. ‘What is the meaning of an accumulation of coffee pots?’ is from Castle’s article, which also quotes an interview wherein Arman states, ‘The meaning of my work is fragmentary.’ The ‘mountain of masks’ references both the COVID-19 pandemic and the experience of masking autistic traits.”
—Lauren Russell
Lauren Russell
