"From Another Other Within, Without" by Pimone Triplett

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 25, 2018   From Another Other Within, Without   Pimone Triplett

Say your body's life-size trip clock starts in schlep   on the down slope. Then the long hand slaloms you steep   as your face tocks the take of nine-to-five. It's just your timing   and mindset that's semi- rattled, and everyone comes to the skit a little   pusillanimous to begin. What is a kind of smudgy justice:   the ancestors' DNA in full wig effect, frizzy edges crimped,   oblivious to wind. Are you really inside that mirror slice?   Pacing over past junkets still, a hybrid hallucination got   stock-carded into a being strange to be, like that griffen   who slips so casual onto someone else's map of laughing tropic   locales. Friend, look hard. Mix. Step out. The center bit by bit gets beiged.   You are one hundred percent half-and-half. In the hemi is the how.                Copyright © 2018 Pimone Triplett. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I very much wanted the experience of the poem to be a wash of language, with many words seeming to be suggested by, or reflected off of, what comes before them. I suppose the poem is somewhat mimetic of its own notions, where history and heritage are odd glints coming at the waiting consciousness rather than originating from it, like reflections rather than sources of light. I'd been thinking about the narratives, or shaped histories, that are in place long before any individual's arrival on the scene. And I wondered in this particular poem how the self's formation might be intensified (or thwarted?) by the accidents, or destinies, of a mixed-race heritage (or at least, a sense that one's parents, in my case, come from very different cultural zones). Then, I wound up adding how one's inner life is also made contingent by our various life stages. The poem ends on a more assertive note, a kind of mini-manifesto that wobbles, I hope, between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek." —Pimone Triplett   Pimone Triplett's most recent book is Supply Chain (University of Iowa Press, 2017). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington's MFA program and lives in Seattle. Poetry by Triplett   Supply Chain (University of Iowa Press, 2017) "badlands: a song of flux, out of time" by Lee Ann Roripaugh "Notes on the Below" by Ada Limón "Barbie Chang Loves Evites" by Victoria Chang June Guest Editor: D. A. Powell   Thanks to D. A. Powell, author of Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails (Graywolf Press, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Powell and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038