I don’t have a zip code, a house, a dog, mailman, milkman, president. Weaving on a stem of ragweed, voracious, not in any classroom or strip motel or restaurant of any false or real ethnicity, in bed, flat on my back, I felt short of breath like an invalid. I was that high laugh-cry that throws salt into your wound at the time of night you’re already bedded down in your loneliness. Weeks in a hotel off the interstate. So lonely I start getting mawkish. And I’ll tell you, it changed me. It changed my hands not to have the sky like drive-in movie screens showing repeatedly films about beards, legless homeless talking to themselves on red dirt corners, laughing at the notion of ever having worked through a sinkful of dishes, rounding a corner on their handmade cart. I was also in a strange time zone, and at a high elevation, so that I had no origin story, no soul. I was, practically speaking, an appliance.
NOTE: This cento is made up of lines taken from a sequence of six sonnets by Diane Seuss.* In each of the source poems, the lines are so tightly enjambed as to form a linguistic Jenga tower, the very emblem of Seuss’s syntactic genius and wry poetic intelligence. I adore her.
*Apart from a few small changes to punctuation and capitalization, the integrity of the original lines has been preserved. If you read the sequence, be sure to scroll down to the poet’s account of its making. The six sonnets were later included, not as a separate sequence, in her collection frank: sonnets, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and is a fabulous book regardless.
love the form
This one really spoke to me, XP. Many of the lines resonated for me, shifted into a new space but calling back to where I'd read them before. I was open to your source being anything, but not surprised to find it was Seuss's frank: sonnets.