Even When I Think of Dying, I Dream of Poetry

(Content Warning: Mention of suicide and sexual violence)

I never knew I would write a poem about wanting to die until I did.

It had been years since the first time. The snow on the ground had melted 18 times over. Each year, the snow coming in later than the last. What was once a square of dead grass is now concrete.  

The last time I stood on that concrete was this summer. Three generations of family gathered when I came to town. Time was elongated then too. More than a year since the first signs of COVID-19 in the U.S. triggered a nationwide response, of sheltering-in-place; more than a year of enduring the distance between California and New York, the missing.

My mother had strung up a Minnie Mouse themed Happy Birthday sign she found at the nearby dollar store even though my birthday had been more than a month past. When I saw it, I laughed, and she laughed too. Later, every time I think of it, I cry.

I had turned 33 years old. I was 15 when I first wanted to die. The ground where I stood, sizzling with the smell of meat from the barbecue, at some point had dragged me into its cold and cavernous hold. Then I was 18. I had felt the same familiar sinking in my body, as if every organ was caving in. 24 when the wrong medication prescribed to me made every movement feel unbearable. 25 when anonymous messages made their way to my inbox, attributing my achievements to dangling the possibility of sex among those with influence. Having no possible means to contest these accusations without opening the doors to unwanted discussions of sexual harassment I experienced, I let those words drown me out.

And so, the abyss stayed, having never really left its place. More than a month after my 33^rd birthday, my family gathered around a white cake, singing. It was enough to forget for a moment that just a year ago, one of us had died, and another is trying to keep from dying; to forget that the pandemic surges on throughout the world, seemingly without end.

Just a couple of feet away, a pair of newly planted fig trees grew, neither one knowing anything of me or my history.

***

A therapist friend who had recently taken on a writer as a client asked me once, “Why do you all do it? Make art where you constantly excavate your most painful traumas. It’s excruciating.”

I contested: It is life that is excruciating. That it is ecstatically joyful, too, is what we find hard to reconcile.

***

Earlier this year, a white man walked into several salons in Atlanta and murdered six Asian women. The widespread debate about the man’s racial motivations in news coverage of the crimes added insult to injury.

It is 2021, and the dreams of a post-racial future touted in the Obama presidential era were quickly dashed by the election of Trump. For those who had not been listening all along, the fantasy of a multiracial utopia was undone by our fascist reality. It is no wonder that racial pain, any pain affiliated with the types of experiences constantly denied, can continue to remain invisible to some.

Perhaps it is too reductive to say that poetry or literature at large is a means of elucidating the pain that has consistently been refused its recognition. I do not think pain has to be legible for it to be validated. Some pain, after all, is beyond language. Sometimes, pain is a hole that never goes away.

I wrote three books about grief and pain. The last one, Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), I half-joked with my therapist, was rightfully dedicated to her, as her years of guidance practically wrote the book itself. “You’re basically the co-author,” I said, laughing.

After all, how far would you be able to get into a poem if pain had only one valence?

Achille Mbembe argues in his writing on necropolitics that “…the human being truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death…” That is, subject of the state, subject of civic belonging. But what if the state actively participates in creating the conditions in which you are dying or quickly moving towards your death?

For some of us, death has been a persistent presence the moment we realize we are subject to a surveillant force that manages our life and dying. That death may be the only thing we have autonomy over. What a terrifying sentence to write. And yet, the stigma of talking about death, dying, and the leaky thresholds of our pain, can sometimes feel insurmountable, and this is a part of state sanctioned violence itself.

The late transfemme artist Mark Aguhar, in her “Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body,” opens with a list of condemnations of the assorted white supremacist, transphobic, fatphobic, and ableist violence that had besieged her life (a litany of “fuck yous,” if you will). And then, the prayer: “BLESSED ARE THE SISSES / BLESSED ARE THE BOI DYKES / BLESSED ARE THE PEOPLE OF COLOR MY BELOVED KIN.” The list goes on, and even as I recall her death by suicide, these words remain ever true.

This is not an aestheticization of pain, not an attempt to glorify death. If anything, poetry has so lovingly ferried me between life and death so many times, and every time I come close to touching death, I see its precision and permanence. To write it is to approach the feeling of grief in real-time, to hold its moment to the light. I am sure that when you read poems of grief and mourning, you feel this too. Perhaps you were waiting for someone to describe the texture of this ache first, so you can continue.

I want to write this because people I love have died and people who my people love have died. Somehow, despite our profundity with language, we hit a wall in the face of this incessant death. Where there is no distance between the traumatic event and the processing of it, there is only the enduring pain itself.

To write a poem is to address your pain in the past. So that someone in the future can see. And so that they can hold these words close. To feel the empty pit of their grief populate with noise.

To write a poem is to arrive at your mourning, knowing that you are not alone.

Kay Ulanday Barrett, in their poem “Tell a Child About Something That Causes You Fear Or Dread,” writes, “Let me tell you: / to die every day is to pulse / music.” I would like to think that these lines are pointing to the precariousness of this life, especially for those of us who live closer to the margins. Yet this proximity to death is also where the music plays most loudly. The body hums. It is the everlasting heart. Like the poem, we too can outlast the violence of this time.