This collaborative writing exercise was quite a journey. I liked that I didn’t really know where I was going. Most challenging was the act of sitting with someone else’s words and trying to inject my own poetic voice and vision into the disarticulated mix. I played a lot during the past couple of weeks and put together several drafts of different poems, but in the end, the image that kept tugging at me was that of a purple-colored woman, bellowing through time. I didn’t know who she was at first, but at some point in the writing process, I realized that the story of Sandra Bland was weighing heavy on my mind and heart, and that fragments of her were bleeding into the poem I was piecing together. This disarticulated poem is for her.
dis•articulations 2015 