Onism: The grief of being caught in your own body.

Braided wheat. Chafed skin. Love 
meant this to me when I was four. 

My backbone surrendering to the wind like wheat stalks 
the refuged crows sleep in. I didn’t know 

but from my back leapt a garden. The bombs 
left steel and copper rain in its descent. 

I was told not to pick up shimmery things 
in the light. But I once found 

one the shape of my birthmark underneath my chin, 
held it to the bare vectors along my throat

and I thought it completed me, filled the hole 
where light was pouring and wouldn’t 

couldn’t stop. I picked up a rusted lump and 
told me this is the same thing freedom 

is made out of. I repeated this everyday 
so I’d know freedom when I see it. 

Freedom was a thing in fairy tales, 
in a grandmother’s hand pressed into mine at night 

trying to rub into me all the prayers in the world. 
Moonkissed, it was there that she gave me 

my name. I look up and the birds break 
open in a cacophony of home and song. 

Winged promise. A name is a prayer. 
My name means light.

Process

I originally wrote this poem with all the pronouns being “you.” It was a poem addressed to my mother. Months later, I revisited this poem. Edited some parts, changed some spacing. I kept on rereading it until I realized: I didn’t know who “you” was. It felt estranged and perhaps escapist to address my poem to an ambiguous “you” instead of my mother. So I changed all the pronouns to “her.” But now this “her” seemed to embody an elusive identity attached to no one. Who was “her”? The word felt like a foreign trinket in this poem that didn’t quite fit. Another thought entered my mind: what if I change the pronouns to “me”? What a strange and vulnerable feeling writing the last sentence was! My hesitancy to write it perhaps is the grief that my name belongs to me, that I am in my own body. But it felt “right.” So often we appear to be writing about one thing, but in reality we are writing about something else. The subject of poetry can be fluid, and changing it can change the meaning of the poem.