by Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
It comes seeking the legitimacy of history but
even that feels like a violence—that is: history
is narrative. The need to break the plot
of itself. The field, something like a field
is a plot. A plot is a demarcation. I was running
some place like a field & there she was, her hand
at her waist. We were before language, language
was & was not history, she did not hold the memory
of beating before or after, body at ease, arms not
akimbo but almost in a holding. We were all there,
golden, maybe insects in the grass. You were running
into open space, even the sky was different than
what I remembered. Language already happened but
we were before language. Our smells did not matter
except they told each other who was there. (Scarcity—
who invented that name.) Enclosure before history
of enclosure.
For Phoebe Glick and Sara Jane Stoner
after language from Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar was born and raised by a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone's Eyes (Belladonna*, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University and a CantoMundo fellow. She lives in Jersey City, on the periphery of the Hackensack Meadowlands.
For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.
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