“This poem began once upon a time when I was immobile in my bedroom, listening to the sink drip … There’s a terrible abstraction or dissociation that can happen when the spirit is suffering, and in certain dire moments, like many of us, I have turned to acts of self-harm. Not to die but to come back to the body, to come back to Life, to touch base with my physical vitality through the language of pain, the body’s insistence on survival. In reflecting on those moments, I wonder if there’s not some small echo to the offerings of blood by my Mayan ancestors—some private covenant with the deep mysteries of sorrow and the physical self, a forbidden act with secret, forbidden questions. This poem examines the landscape of that pain, and the sacred moment of one’s own private relationship to her pain and the sometimes irrational—and even amoral—path that survival can take.”
—Stephanie Adams-Santos