Grocery Stores that Spill Your Stomach Onto Their Tiles
Yoga W.
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According to Michael Foucault, "the archive is the first law of what can be said." In this sense, the archive as a historical device is but another kind of storytelling, broken and patchworked by the memories of its tellers. In a sense, I write from the spaces between this fractured idea of an archive, this myth of historical continuity, to insist on myself as the teller of, if not the larger archive altogether, but the archive of myself, of the places I've touched. My poetry is a collection of the people who have ever thought of me, and most certainly myself, told by the most unreliable of narrators: myself. I write to explore the woman walking her dog on the other side of the sidewalk this morning, and the waitstaff at that restaurant my family's frequented from the ages of 3 through 16, and the crossing guard who I thank every afternoon walking from school. In the vastly blank expanse of my memory, I repeat the fragments I remember, in order to understand better how they tell me of myself.
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Due to the empathetic nature of its form, creative writing, in many ways, bridges the gap between marginalized peoples and the greater public consciousness. Story was the primary source of empathy that allowed me to reconcile my own agency with the greater societal implications of being marginalized
