Jennifer Fossenbell recently relocated from Beijing, China back to Denver, USA. Her poetry and other linguistic experiments have appeared in online and print publications in China, the U.S., and Vietnam, most recently So & So, Black Warrior Review, The Hunger, and where is the river. She completed her creative writing MFA at the University of Minnesota in 2014. Also, there is no “back”.
WEARING MYSELF BACKWARDS
Q: Where did you mainly compose?
A: Wrong question. I mainly decomposed.
Q: Isn’t creation just another platform for devastation?
A: I’m making another one to lose.
- Did you ever in your life create something original?
A: We are, all of us, children of the one universe.
Q: But the multiverse.
A: Angels and geometry.
Q: What are you so fucking afraid of?
A: Death firstly and second, death of my child, now children.
A: Cancer of the throat or hands. Wrath. Collision.
A: Wondrous visions of pain, which abound.
Q: Because everything and everyone is so fluid.
A: The doing runs over into not doing. The making runs into dying.
Q: Pity the dark that is afraid of itself.
A: I don’t know what it means, but I know it well.
Q: When you approach your bed in the dark, what are you afraid of?
A: Finding myself already lying there.
Q: The body finally gives the body permission.
A: To go out. To fall apart.
Q: There is a sun inside. There is a bright hole.
A: I am a divided state.
Q: All that comes to pass.
A: Too, shall pass.
Q: When you step on the train every day, what are you afraid of?
A: Leaving myself behind.