THROUGH
One of my most popular limited edition risograph visual poem zines
Through is a visual poem I created in 2019, to specifically take the form of a 2-color risograph-printed zine. The original edition contained only 25 zines, and they sold out years ago. Now, it lives on through my first poetry anthology, Surviving, which contains more full-color renditions of my visual poem zines.
If you have any trouble reading the images of the visual poem in its original form, here it is:
I could feel words being leeched from my brain. My consciousness being tugged in different directions. Like elastic threads being woven too tightly and then suddenly released. But they didn't bounce back. They snapped. I didn't know what was happening. I tried to lay my head onto the pillow. A falling sensation swept through me. Through my bery being. I was falling. Falling through the pillow, the mattress, the floor, into the earth. Deeper and deeper. I opened my eyes and saw the world spinning around me. Nothing was legible. I tried to stare at a spot where I thought the window blinds would be. Light and darkness swirled together. The horizontal repetition of the blinds echoed infinitely through my vision. I heard no breathing beside me. I couldn't hear my own breathing either, even though I could feel my breath coming in shallow waves. For a moment it seemed the spinning, falling, and tugging sensations lessened. I heard a noise behind my head, where I knew the other window must be. Formless black seeped through a broken blind. A hand reached out and gripped my forehead in its palm, fingers digging into my scalp. My very essence filtered through my head, using my porous vertebrae as a sieve. All that remained, all else having been sifted out, was quiet panic. A rhythmic droning moving back and forth, back and forth. My eyes were closed again. The sound grew still louder. Sharp, high-pitched tinges at the edges of my mind. SNAP I opened my eyes and light poured in through windows with no curtains. My vision was sandy, black holes popping in and out. The snap echoed through my mind.
If you’d like to own a copy of Through and check out more of my visual poems from 2017-2021, including the one I mention in section 2 of this post, you can grab Surviving!
