In Honor of National Poetry Month
I Call This Trauma
Free Verse
The trauma unfolds in between the folds of the tapestry tattooed in my living room of silence
I howl, but nothing comes out until a new square weaves itself onto there as the old squares start to unravel into a loose spool of thread choking me asleep
I somehow become emboldened in golden and begin to look — to actually study how the threads morph
into knots and bows and loops and holes and knots and bows and loops and holes and knots and bows and loops and holes… — and forget me nots
Sometimes you make a patchwork that you work on tirelessly and needlessly until the trauma unfolds in between the folds of the tapestry
It’s arduous work carrying this thing around like an old wet blanket but I think I’m finally comprehending that it needs to be housed in a museum and framed and reframed and observed and studied and, well, displayed like an artifact
So that if and when I am forced to confront the lava erupting from the sleeper cell of a volcano I can Wear it, I can Speak it, I can Preserve it —
I can let it hit the air so that its power diminishes over me or perhaps it can be plastered into some sort of sculpture: a live, living vulture to be placed on a pedestal with the inscription — “I survived.”
*Originally published in FreshVoices22 by the Candian League of Poets.
Lindsay Soberano Wilson is the creator of Put It To Rest. Her debut full-length poetry book is forthcoming, Hoods of Motherhood: A Collection of Poems (Prolific Pulse Press, May 2023). Casa de mi Corazón: A Travel Journal of Poetry & Memoir is available at lindsaysoberano.com. Find her on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. Lindsay Soberano-Wilson©2023.
I Call This Trauma stands as a testament to the benefit of accepting, sitting with, moving through, eventually talking about, and then sharing trauma through art as a form of healing. I think that housing this poem in my own start-up publication holds a lot of meaning. It is my intention that this poem reflects what #PutItToRest will come to represent, as readers and writers will choose to share their journeys of healing here to then put them to rest.
For a Spoken Word version of I Call This Trauma visit Poetry Matters IGTV.
