What Light: This Week’s Poem: Vanessa Ramos
A new poetry competition cycle is beginning, so get your poetry submissions together. Deadline for the next round of What Light poetry contest is November 25.
Creation Story
threads the eye with a vein , a crimson pulse
years ago, she begins
when your body was still of earth, I planted a song in your throat
she touches my undeveloped chest with her fingernails,
tracing a shape over the space where my heart should beat
the song was pipe-like and placed beneath a nose and mouth I had not yet completed
I found it in the desert underneath a gray stone
her hands shiver in the current of electric air between us
for a time I carried the song with me
she pulls the vein through my skin,
connecting her heart to my own
each day, I sat and watched the tubes branch like
a tree from your center, their swollen balloon-like ends
expanding into the upper reaches of your chest, a tree of life
and in this way, I am bound to her
your breath anchored in song
and in this way, you are bound to me
with surgical precision
now that I am older,
lovers trail their fingers along the scars snaking across my skin,
and when they ask about the history of my body, I tell them:
Poetics
Personal history as myth infuses Creation Story, a poem loosely based on the memory of my mother removing a sliver from my fingertip with a needle she first heated on the stove. In an article titled the “The Inner Story,” Helen Luke discusses C.G. Jung’s notion about the inner myth—how our own story is formed in response to great mythic archetypes that manifest in our day-to-day lives. This interplay between myth and reality, for me, is a generative force.
Biography
Vanessa Ramos is a student in the MFA program at