us girls

us girls amidst girls wield the weaving material scattered kaleidoscopic. This recognition beyond sight, the apparatus of vision pressed up against glass. Gender discontinuum, flesh of collected invention obliged to my own social contract.

Tooth against tooth, braced into breaking. This one dream I do not write down, it’s viscera remains. It arrives again no less familiar; toolless defanging, making room in the mouth for gumming. Twin mirror averse syncing into study spins of Juturna. The bloodied canines in my palm do not render me powerless: now there’s a new way to whistle.

Copyright © 2023 by S*an D. Henry-Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 12, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“At this time, in a shared answerless, my life and writing, I drench in uncertainty. When I can, I trust the constant as process (even though the pace at which I move and the pace at which I am forced to move are at odds). All these dreams of teeth, fountains, reflecting pools . . .  All I know is the attempt. In the mirror, I make an audience, and an audience finds me. The mirror, the place of rehearsal. ‘us girls’ is an attempt at self-portraiture, which is an attempt to know, and a constant site of improvisation, the rehearsal of self-image made practice eternal, keeping time with the shadow. Embodied Sacred and Sisters of the Choir. An attempt at a chord. Semitones grate between harmony. I show them quietly and say, ‘That isn’t me,’ but point again to the troubled water, the sap-drunk bees, the ecstatic shadow, and exclaim—‘But this one! That is who I am!’ So as to reconcile a questioning image, my slow journey to who I know, I offer this poem. The photograph, what it can speak to, but cannot tell, which is to say Wind, which is to say Sacred. And to see in it! Not consumed, not captured. How to be seen: witnessed in the self-possession I invite you to and hope to find an invitation to punctum.”
—S*an D. Henry-Smith