about a plot line from your favorite soap, call it
“Marlena, Possessed. Again.” You should write
a poem about gas giants not as failed stars but
successful planets. About what scientists call
exotic physics—gamma rays coming from
the Sun, not from its core but from protons
slingshot through space by supernovas. Or
the real-life blob at the Paris Zoo, a self-healing
organism with over 700 sexes. Or how when
two tones of slightly different frequencies
are played simultaneously, the listener will
create a third to bridge the gap between
them. You should write a poem that imagines
that tone as the place beyond a poem, where
the poem lives after it’s been read—a grassy hill
on which it unfurls like a flower blossoming.
You should write a poem about how, once,
you tried to write a poem—an erasure—& just
couldn’t do it, that there was something about
seeing within the spaces between words that
your mind could not grasp, even when it
reached for the grassy hill, for the open petals
of the flower, how all you saw was black. Like
in that video where the star swallows a gas giant.
Like what you saw months before your father
died, every time you thought: future. You should
write a poem where you put all the words back
in, pull the planet from the sky’s dark mouth,
an erasure of an erasure.
Ja'net Danielo
Ja'net Danielo is the author of two chapbooks, including, most recently, This Body I Have Tried to Write, (MAYDAY, 2022). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in swamp pink, Diode, Raleigh Review, Radar Poetry, and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press), among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net lives in Long Beach, CA. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.
