Two Poems
— Joyce Chong
Because in the dark, what matters most
is how the shutter of a throat closes & not
how empty it is.
Carefully crafted language and recurring themes define today’s poems on the Wilds. The ways in which two individual poems can overlap in atmosphere and imagery but differ in tone and intention. What struck me the most about these poems was the inventiveness of imagery, how one idea ties to the next with such unexpected movements and transitions. In these poems there are the faintest traces of yearning, distance, and isolation. Extracting the reader from the whole of the truth only amplifies that effect.
I will never know what it means
to be afraid. As in compressing
a body into a bruise & praying
it will never be unclenched.
There is the sensation of a feeling or an emotion, but no clear, discernible reason. In this way, poetry replicates reality, where things are at times uncertain and free from our compulsion to categorize everything as cause and effect. Sometimes it’s only meant to be felt; to know it for what it is.