Each day, my I changes forms. It’s why I stick to the sonnet:
I like the continuity of it—each day with its plan to queer the Diane.
I was different six words ago. The day I got my name
I was someone; all others: somebody else. Just beyond the self
is where I sit, each day a gleam that doesn’t wake the calendar.
Today is a word with twinned violins strapped to its dress. This day
is two deer with only one antler. After one day in the world
we could spend the rest of our days in solitary confinement, is what
Camus said. Try to argue with that. Our shared human heart
could use a place to stretch out. To unfeel the world. Lay down
its flags, the dead lighting these rivers of air with their goodness.
Whatever is waltzing through my breath will one day feel like
enough: I will turn eons into one day, reversing how colonizers felled
our good magic, made god a man. One day this state will dive into the sun.
Diane Raptosh’s collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan) was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. She has served as Boise’s poet laureate and the Idaho Writer-in-Residence and won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. She teaches literature and creative writing and codirects the program in criminal justice and prison studies at the College of Idaho. Her ninth book of poems, I Eric America (Etruscan), was published in 2024.
Image: Roxanne Zerni for Unsplash+
