As in We Will Not Pass
Dichroic. Glass: half-empty, half-full. As in my paperwork glowered; my paperweight glowed. A hard drive. Backing up. By the hour. We cannot be bought. But, we flower.
Flour to coat the bottom of a pan. Sometimes a moment, I understand! A window. Light. Diachronic. Glass: mourning, This, too, shall pass.
Copyright © 2018 by Amy Sara Carroll. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In the fall of 2017, in the face of nested uncertainties, I imagined this poem to be an iridescent engagement with the idea and practice of self-care as warfare. On the one hand, I wanted the poem to index the nuance of shifting colors or arguments in dichroic glass or diachronic narratives. On the other, I needed it to set clear boundaries. A political, social, aesthetic tension turns on the word pass in the poem, becomes its through line after all. The we—hardly royal—of the poem will not pass; the situation or situations that this we faces must or will pass eventually. In between lies the heavy lifting to make—per the Zapatista maxim—‘a world in which many worlds fit.’”
—Amy Sara Carroll
Amy Sara Carroll
Amy Sara Carroll is the author of the poetry collection Fannie + Freddie/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham University Press, 2013).