I twist myself into a knot
the day pulls taut.
I am what I am
told. Good red meat

gone necrotic. A spot of black
spread out to ruin

a perfect evening. It's the way
the weather wears me.

A cold, blank day. My blood-
burned fingers. A white noise

swelling in me. It's nothing
but night now. That's how

all the days end. An hour
glistens in its glass case, turns

rancid in my memory.
Another day, another

dress the day lays out
before me. I grow older

if I'm lucky.
And I'm lucky.

My sad heart in its excess.
Such petty injury. I am worn

against the weather. Limp and prone
to empty.

What came before this.
I can't remember.

I dress for all the lives I want
behind me. I have come here

to make seen the day
I see. I fall from focus.

The day goes sour. It asks me
nothing. It asks nothing of me.


About this poem
"I've been thinking a lot about the idea of the self as it exists in the ether of one's mind and what happens to that interior identity when the physical form that contains it moves through the world, coming up against all the expectations a culture has of its various bodies, all the identities we construct for each other based on what we see. In what ways do we resist these expectations or resign ourselves to them? How do we reconcile the self that lives within us with what is seen of us or what isn't seen?"
-Camille Rankine

About Camille Rankine
Camille Rankine is the author of "Incorrect Merciful Impulses" (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). She is the assistant director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in New York City.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Camille Rankine. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate