If I drew lines
On my skin
Between my wrist and my arm
Between my eyes and my forehead
Between my nose and my lips
I would not feel
Shivers move across the hair on my arms
The stinging in my eyes from sweat on my forehead
The smell of pecan pie, singing to my tongue to salivate.
If I drew lines
Inside my body
Between my throat and my stomach
Between my veins and my heart
Between my lungs and my breath
I would not know
How to swallow an apple
Where the thumping of my chest would go
The joy of inhaling life with every coming second.
I drew lines
On mother earth
Between her oceans
Between her green and brown and orange
And I assigned them names
And some of them mattered more than others
I coloured the lines in grade school
I covered histories of genocide
In green and yellow
And blue
If with these lines
I told my heart that it mattered more than my hand
Or my lungs that they mattered more than my mouth
Or my feet that they mattered more than my ears
I would try to hold with my heart
Or taste with my lungs
Or hear with my feet.
My hand and my mouth would try to tell me that this wasn’t how it was meant to be
But I wouldn’t be able to hear them.
Rationale:
This poem uses the body as a symbol for the Earth and relates to the transnational topic of questioning the construct of the border and legitimacy of the nation state. When writing this poem, I tried to imagine the earth as a body that has been unjustly divided for different purposes as an alternative perspective from the mainstream neoliberal ideology, which naturalizes the existence of the nation-state. I also chose to include colonization as a theme in my poem, especially to exemplify how mainstream schools socialize students into adopting colonial nationalistic attitudes, through, for example, colouring maps. Through this poem, I hope to send the message that borders are temporary and constructed, and that revolution is possible.
Keywords: poetry, borders, creative
Author: jbb28
This poem was beautiful, thank you for sharing your art with us. Borders may be invisible but they do exist and you captured that perfectly. I was moved by your words and it made me think of all the borders that exist in everyday life. I specifically thought about gender norms and body boundaries. I think it's important to notice these specific boundaries are in effect and not only create distance but can also be broken. As you mentioned, we are taught from a very young age to "colour inside the lines" and in that, we are teaching a neoliberal colonial message that it's wrong to jump outside of the norm and we should be teaching to notice what happen…
First of all, this poem is amazing and thank you for writing it. I am absolutely enthralled by the work, you are an incredible linguist. Something that comes to mind when thinking about your poetry is the way that colonialism seeks to dominate, exploit and control lands, peoples and cultures. If we are to think about lands, cultures and communities as bodies, then colonialism can be seen as an exploitation of the body for personal, economic and political gain. Therefore the beauty of your poem lies in the fact that it acknowledges how borders don’t just exist between nations, but it’s possible to create borders in communities, in our relationships, in our activist initiatives, and even on our own bodies,…