On Flats by Leah Souffrant

Leah Souffrant lives in Brooklyn.




Since I did not make the rules, I must interrogate. Experiment with flats. Wear legs bare. Say blood say body maybe quietly or not. I’m not a spectacle. Smirk in the not-sonnet.

Poetry is a form, language dancing in space and time. Dance is a movement in form, sweep of the arm outstretched, steady. Bodies moving in form. Form participates in rules, but art is something else.

I don’t ask what a poem is.
This means, my day, my timing, my rhythm, my life.
This means, don’t let language be torn away from the body, a violation, separation of mind and body when it is rather mindbody. Thought is brain exercising, and I blush.

The body is awash in sentimentality. Sometimes.
Let me write that. Or not.

I don’t want to play sometimes but rules are the dance of poetry’s work, language at play with itself, not twisting its ankle, or doing so leaping.
And then there is meaning: mine and yours, moving, menstruating, lactating meaning, exploding meaning maybe, making feeling crying yes weeping meaning, maybe cooking meaning maybe kissing meaning, yes loving meaning, making it building it creating it, destroying it meaning,

But o let it reside there, living, because I’ve only just started to speak.

The [feminist] writer in me knows this: there’s a lot more to say, ways to say it, and many hearty good reasons not to rhyme and
to sing it weeping rhyming.

30 April 2009