Transcription by Amber Rose

Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it—

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten

Here I sit on my bedroom floor thinking

Trying to create poetry, confined

As if I were painting without colors

The brushes dancing across the blank page

Nothing appears, just blank stares back at me

Limited by this box it encloses

Creativity drowns beneath my feet

Motivation struggles to push me on

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten

Once you start you drag it on to thirty

Poetry should be as free as a fall leave

Swaying in the wind, gliding through the air

Poetry should be natural, effortless

But here I sit lagging with syllabus

Counting up to ten all again and again

Like the tick of a clock stuck at a time

Imitation after imitation

I close my eyes tight and I imagine

No more counting syllabus on my hand

No more tedious lines up to thirty

In my head I can see the color now

Brushes twirling across the bright pages

Laughter and delight are colored with red

While sadness and misery a deep blue

A poem now free it flies with the leaves

Confined by only the walls of its mind

Free to express in anyways it please

Stifled by 10 syllabus, thirty lines

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Poem of the Day: Translation

BY DEIRDRE O'CONNOR

Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it—

the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly

like a book an old love sent with an inscription

in his hand, whatever it meant,

After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . .

—the script of it like the way my self felt

learning German words by chance—Mitgefühl,

Unheimlichkeit—and the trailing off that happened

because I knew only the feelings, abstract

and international, like ghosts or connotations

lacking a grammar, a place to go:

this was the way my self felt when it started

falling apart: each piece of it clipped

from a garden vaguely remembered

by somebody unrecognizable—

such a strange bouquet that somebody sent

to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.