Reading Travels to Writing as Sound Travels to Light

The audience doesn’t always know what they want. Most of the time, they want what they don’t want. The director’s job is to fulfill their wants and the narrator’s job is to tell the story. The director and the narrator could like or dislike their jobs, but nobody looks away long enough to ask the question.

It’s getting late for you.

Three years ago, I wrote a poem about a ghost. I had never met another ghost until today. I knew it had to be that poem ghost by the looks of it. Most of the time, I move faster and slower than any of my perceptions. Most of the time, I move like a wolf pup with ambitions like killing a bear and drinking the blood in its throat.

Don’t try to kill it twice.

The brain doesn’t always trust the body but the body has to move or it grows sick with revenge. The brain sees today’s language and puts up blinders, sees erasure poetry, and words strung loosely together like Halloween skeleton bones hanging from a tree.

They’re only plastic.

I never write about the things I don’t know or don’t care about, and anyone would guess what I know or care about incorrectly. The brain sees yesterday’s language and knows it knows something. Mostly, I know hunger and pain or no pain at all and that is all I write about. Mostly, I know about the knots in my brain and how my body grows around them.

You can keep the bones.

Mostly, I do. Mostly, it narrates over my life like a shadow of a shadow. It comes out of my mouth in loose sinuous strands and carries me out of the hallway. A stranger in the forest. A silhouette in the mirror. I hang around my shoulder like a premonition.

Aimee Wai is a creative writer and engineer. She is based in Austin, Texas where she recently launched a creative writing publication, The Projection Room, on Substack. Her work can be found in Only Poems, where she was featured as Poet of the Week. She talks about poetry and creative writing on Threads as @aimeewai_.