This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ’10 am is When You Come to Me’ by Meg Day. Day explains her thoughts behind this poem and they resonate with me. “Hearing folks frequently ask Deaf folks to imagine our lives differently: they ask how we haven’t killed ourselves without music (because they would); they want to know how much we miss the sound of birds, our lover’s voice; and they don’t want to learn ASL but they want to have sex with the lights out. As I try to de-center nondisabled and hearing priorities in my work, I’ve had to think differently about the relationships I have with people who occupy those identities. This poem refuses the basic complaints of audism—and the simultaneous oversexualization of queer bodies, and desexualization of Deaf and disabled ones—in order to tend the nuances of being TransDeaf and falling in love with a cis woman who is disabled but not Deaf. It’s a poem about the complicated and intimately gendered synesthesia of sight as sound. It’s a love poem about DEAF-GAIN: I can imagine another life, but I don’t want it.”
Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award. She lives in Pennsylvania.
I have matched this image entitled ‘Shine Bright’ by @jilllian2 – Jill Lian with this poem.
You can view and follow her work on Instagram here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
