Right now there are teenage microwaves screaming through your body while you are having text with me. This is the moment I'll need you to sing with me. I am making my way in some dark room looking for other structures to love. From the left something speaking I can't identify. The floor goes unfixed and moving and this doesn't happen only at night but during the day when I don't want to think on it. That I saw a blood-orange ball caught out my window. That I'm listening to light and it said time. I'm listening to time, it says, ha. You need to be howling at bloody torn space. Need to be spooked out of your hidey-hole and its glowing mess. But I love this ball I'm riding on. The strange hunk of metal and rock whizzing around my loves and my loving. The fact I spin and it spins and everything is spinning close up. From far away it's so cool. I guess they call this physics or they call it laws. If they're so well-made, why do we suffer? I thought the day was opening but now I see it's already gone. Outside the cruel dove has a broken window. The day isn't friendly. Who are you to me? A way to understand the floor? The floor that holds me up and leaves me standing. I don't know where to go. Me, Tuesday at 5 p.m. What does it mean to be in a room, any room. The wind banging against the clapboard. I know enough to see the cracked pane isn't going to be fixed anytime soon. Who has time for such things in the song? Breaking. Blooming. The wobble of light on wood-grain late in the day. In the loneliness of orange. In the loveliness of orange.
"The poem, 'When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy,' speaks to being in a state of bewilderment and the experiencing of an ungainly solitude as one is being haunted by digital communication technology (the invisible), a room, and the sun’s movement."
Claudia Rankine discusses books by Cathy Park Hong, Ed Morales, Jess Row, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Jericho Brown, while also reflecting on her own work. "I’m really interested in how to get the structure to, in some way, mimic the intent of the project. Both Citizen and Just Us ask for an involvement from the reader—and that means you’re going to lose readers—but that also makes you feel like you’re part of it."
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“I remember telling my students give me a minute I have to write something down, and though I say 'the words just came' the language itself felt almost intrusive, like a clumsy adaptation of a finer, more efficient form of communication—and yet, the pressure to inscribe was compelling. It was like passively receiving something and also being able to physically make something at the same time."
