The first time I felt my stomach turn,
I knew only what it felt like
and could not verbalize the experience.
Mixed up syntax and unfit words placed out of context.
Misunderstood many times
while thinking that I was understood
in transition between chapters…
Misheard and misinterpreted, I ran before I could walk,
breaking rules that Strunk and White would most likely not approve of.
Making things sound good enough
to keep eyes on me, ears on my cadence,
forces of the unseen would sneak behind your chair,
wrapping arms softly around your ribs.
It went unnoticed that your papers were being flipped
and now blankly they sat on desks.
There was nothing else to follow
other than what was in the air.
All eyes on me.
You could trust that what I was saying was true
because at the end of every thought echoed an emotion you couldn’t ignore;
it mirrored a part of you that you couldn’t bear to share.
You emotionally tapped out, and I tapped in.
I could vocalize things you were too afraid to say to the room.
Somewhere on that realm I caught on,
reading yesterday’s memory back into the present
to predict tomorrow.
On Language and the In-Between
For a long time, I thought misunderstanding meant I had failed to communicate. So I delved into what I knew: cadence, intuition, emotion, and the unseen.
The dawn of a bigger body of work where I share the memories of growing up in a Dominican-American home, in between Washington Heights and Harlem, English and Spanish, gullibility and awareness. What I could feel and what I knew how to name.
The First Liminal Event is a prose poem where identity does not perfectly fit into one language, one geography, one way of knowing, or one version of the self.
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