I listened to my old life played out in analog.
Performers juxtaposed against the blue.
Pitch fork, clover, the swallows.
Is it too much to occupy one’s own architecture, a density of voids?
Stretched canvas, sharp tools oscillating.
Men putting up gutters, brush hogging the yard.
“Do you speak Tagalog, or Chinese?”
Seedlings nestled under shale.
What if time modulates, as music does?
Pizzicato, like rain.
The men shrouding the windows so the sawdust will not get in.
(Semi-transparent architecture, something that remains a dream.)
The farmhouse with its shuttered windows.
Wrestling with entropy, the inside of desire.
I wanted something simple, something I could name.

Contributor’s Notes

Born in Toronto to Filipino immigrants, J. Mae Barizo is a poet, essayist and performer. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books, 2015) and Tender Machines (Tupelo Press, 2023). She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bennington College, Mellon Foundation, Critical Minded, Jerome Foundation and Poets House. Recent writing appears in Poetry, Ploughshares, Esquire, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, BookForum, among others. She is on the board of Kundiman, an organization supporting writers and readers from the Asian diaspora. She is on the MFA faculty of The New School and lives in New York City.