attention as a form of ethics [excerpt]

^{We are mired in matter until we are not
 — Ralph Lemon}

I thought we were an archipelago 
each felt under our own finessed and gilded wing 
let’s make an assumption 
let’s make an assumption that            the lake has a bottom 
let’s make an assumption       that everyone will mourn 
let’s sack a hundred greenbacks 
for the sake of acknowledging they mean something 
what does it mean to have worth? 
who would dream to drain a lake? 
I spent my days staring into the eye of the Baltic 
it’s because I am also a body of water 
it’s not that onerous  
I’ve built a muscle memory  
it’s not that heavy 
let’s talk about erasure I mean 
that’s easy 
start with a word that you don’t like 
start with a people you didn’t know 
start with a neighborhood, rank 
start with any miasma dispersed 
let’s talk about burden 
let’s talk about burden for the weight 
it lends us 
let’s talk about supplication 
about my palms — uplift, patience 

 
let’s celebrate our substance  
subsistence in  
amber rivulets of stilllife 
constellations how you molded me  
country how we became it 
the longitude is a contested border  
my longest muscle I named  familiar 

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“I wrote this poem while listening to a talk Simone White gave in the spring of 2018 at Savvy Contemporary called ‘Erotic Power/Erotic Punishment.’ I’d also been listening to a performance-lecture that Ralph Lemon gave at UC Berkeley in 2012, and make a conversation of them because they both are filled with stillness and quiet electricity. Okwui Okpokwasili's ‘Poor People’s TV Room’ was also rattling around my head, somewhere (everywhere). I often think about what it means to give any act undivided attention, and what emerges in the space where we enact this kind of seeing. I like to think in threes and thirds and triptychs and trilogies and I try to translate the extension and duration of performance onto the page.”
—Asiya Wadud