From "Extraction" by Allison Joseph
"If there is a poem in you,
get it out by any means necessary--"
said my teacher when I begged her
for advice on how to write, how to
scream and pull the hair from my
throat that seemed to block a
passageway to words and thought.
I couldn't release the tension,
perhaps because of her class
and constant insistence on my stark
writing, or what I thought was such.
She recommended cutting open my arm,
just below the shoulder, and pulling
with tweezers to see what would come
out. She claimed that that was one
place words liked to reside, in the
arm. I cut and pulled and searched
until I finally found where they had
been hiding all along. Now when I
need to find my words, I reach
from my back, finding the words
written there in ink and pulling
until the poem is out of me.
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