By Button Poetry
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Franny Choi, performing at Button Poetry Live, January 2019.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
At midnight, I am sitting on my back steps,
00:06
looking at the leaves and listening to the sound a boy is making
00:10
into the night with the peak of his lungs
00:13
somewhere in my neighborhood.
00:16
He is stretching the air, and I do not know what it means, this sound.
00:22
It sounds, I think, like a name, like the name of my friend “Fatimah,”
00:28
Fatimah, but with different letters.
00:30
I think maybe it sounds like a command,
00:34
a long and desperate spell which he makes of the air,
00:38
again and again
00:39
and now growing longer as he shouts it.
00:42
And if I ask my heart, rude translator though it is, to read back this sound,
00:48
what I hear rippling from the quiet floor of my chest
00:51
is, “Let me in, let me in”
00:54
or, “Open it, open it.”
00:58
And now in my chest vocabulary, there is also a door.
01:02
There’s also a blue light in the top window
01:04
and a face that will not appear.
01:07
And some of my friends I know have names that sound like this,
01:12
like, “I am here, I am here.”
01:15
Like, “Why won’t you answer?”
01:17
Like, “Why can’t you see me?”
01:20
And they are mostly not boys,
01:23
but do grow long and blue lit at midnight,
01:27
their spells, the women I know.
01:30
And today a woman sat in front of a panel of men
01:34
who I have to try to believe were too once boys,
01:39
who shivered in the yard.
01:40
A woman sat and had to say again and again,
01:44
“It happened, it happened”
01:47
and watch the glass panes of the once-boys’ faces remain unlit
01:52
and only echoing back with their short vocabularies,
01:55
“Are you sure? Are you sure?
01:58
Are you sure?”
01:59
So tonight, reaching up to hold hands
02:02
with the leaves stretching onto the back steps,
02:05
I say, “Please, let the spell grow legs.
02:09
Let my sisters’ names grow long as their hair,
02:13
long as they need to.
02:15
Let their names rattle the night air with their incessant lungs.
02:19
Let the sounds of their names burn blue in the night.
02:22
Let even their ugliest memories be named after the daughters of prophets.
02:27
Please, if there is a god, named for the humble undersides
02:31
of these leaves, somehow not yet dead,
02:34
let the names of my sisters make all the doors on my street fly open.
02:39
Let every tree sleeping in our chests claw awake
02:43
and rush out to answer that call.”
02:47
(cheers and applause)
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
The post Franny Choi – Prayer for the Untranslated Testimony [Video] appeared first on The Good Men Project.