When the stories, words, enter your body

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"I sing 'Happiness uncontainable'
and 'fields greening in March'
until I'm sad and tired of truth,
and as usual I'm never believed."
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Khaled Mattawa's Zodiac of Echoes struck me in a visceral and mentally shifting place. His poems play around with form, empty space, and geography, commenting on a transnational relationship between place, labor, identity, and memory. I loved his poems, and though some weren't as accessible to me as others, it reiterated many thoughts I've been thinking about lately, like a poem's insularity of multiple meanings, its many shades, and the impressions that we--as a reader--imprint unto the poems.

Mattawa's poems talk a lot about the sea. And that was my gateway into his poems--his sense of displacement and self that was dependent on a vastness that ultimately connects via the body of water. His first poem of the collection opened his moving, stunning voice to me:

"Next time, we promised, it'll be the Atlantic, next time
some salty immensity, some honest to goodness breeze,
the smell of the earth turning around itself,
a clear run to the horizon, a clean shot to Africa,
to something we could beckon and understand,
something the waves would release us from
now that we were stuck here on the Biloxi road
chained, and chain smoking, aware of the sea
we left behind, and that had left us,
the Mediterranean, that other swamp, too far
to touch us again, too far to ever matter."

I brought so many of my own emotive responses to these lines. And I think that's the beauty of poetry in comparison to fiction. There's a direct brevity with poetry that's able to strike the "belly song" much faster, and poetry can use narrative and language as tools in a succinct motion which fiction or prose takes time to create. With poetry, you can picture a world with one phrase, "a clean shot to Africa," and the imagery saturates in your mind, creating a mental space that is vividly distinct and tangible, filled with mood, tone, possibilities, longing. And I think this beauty of poetry has given me so much this past semester, and how Khaled writes from a place of remembering has allowed me to see what I want to do with my own writing, with my own emotions, thoughts, shouts, and whispers on paper.

Khaled's poem series, "Echo & Elixer," was a liminal journey for me. In the second poem, he takes me through the body of languages through cab drivers in Cairo, and I feel the world at the edge of my tongue in this piece. To do such vast movements in my mind--through a narrative, through such brevity--really broke me down to a space of clear adoration. I have to admit it's my favorite poem in the book, or at least one of them.

“Vicinity (A Sequence)" was a constant moving portrait, a poem of accessibility and inaccessibility to me. I say the latter, too, because of its moves in empty space and breath, its differing forms, and how it embodies--to me--a lingering puzzle, a labyrinth of emotive language.

'subway cars plunge into the sea "to form a reef
                           off the Delaware shore." What do you mean to me now
that I have become your substance?
You a moment                           and I am your duration,
a web of instincts             refined
             toward a pure savagery,
                                                    paradisal, pubescent.

To me, this part of the poem becomes an actualization of the metaphysical and self-reference to the poem. When I read a poem, it becomes a part of me, as if the stories, the words, enter my body. I am transfixed by the signifiers, by the objects and forms that the words allude to. In a way, the words do become "a web of instincts      refined / toward a pure savagery, / paradisal, pubescent."