I walked by a stretch of grass and saw a shriveled figure among the stems. I called out to it.
“What has happened to you?”
The mishapen body cried back, “There are other worlds inside of my world.”
I approached the creature. I took its hand up in my grasp.
“There is only this world,” I told it.
“No.” The zombified figure spoke with chapped, bleeding lips. “There is more. And I will only get to feel this much of it in my hands.”
I pressed down a little. Just enough to share the heat of my presence with the monster.
And then I left.
You cannot save someone who has forsaken themselves in the possibility of something more.
The past has become another world,
and empathy need not follow it there.
Tides of human faces—of water—have whorled
into memories; we rub thin into air.
I am still searching for a vision
of myself in there. Everything could be so different if
I could just cut through the noise with precision.
If I didn’t feel tied to this word of “if”. If
I am looking into the past for clarity,
am I still waiting on my epiphany?
I ask nobody in particular:
When did I start forsaking
myself? How far back would I have to go
to find the root of this
personal abandonment?
I look into the past for answers,
because the present has become muddied
by the heat of its
proximity, its
presence.
There is no singular moment
of Shakespeare or Homer or
Milton that will replicate
the heat of a living body. No.
The past has been reduced to
sonnets and Elizabethan theaters.
We wrote ourselves into boxes
back then and only
reinforce them now. So
we have forsaken ourselves;
we have presently removed the possibility
for there to be
other worlds inside of this world. Maybe
I could shed the past like loose skin, but
humanity is a box
I have been written into. And
I’m too scared to shift
the cosmic balance. I’m scared that
humanity hasn’t changed enough and
I could living in another world but
I am irrevocably stuck in this one. And maybe
this world is just a big performance
like a gender binary or a
religious hierarchy, like
we don’t risk a part of ourselves
passing as one of many
creatures with nothing extraordinary
to see here at all, and maybe
I am scared there are
other worlds inside of
my world and that
I am doing a disservice to this
body of mine. That I am failing
upwards and
downwards and
I could be doing so much more
but I have left my chances in the past.
In a box.
This world could be any other world, but I am already satisfied. If you know what I’m saying, why does it matter how I say it? Everything I want already exists in this world or is capable of being born into this world. Do you understand now? We are here even though
Project Amalgamation Reflection
I wasn’t entirely sure how to close out the semester with all the thoughts I have been having related to humanities at our university and humanity as a whole. The piece that touched me the most when reading this semester was certainly It Is Hard to Believe that There Are Other Worlds in this World. So, I thought it was only fitting to make a sort of ‘amalgamation’ reflecting on how that made me feel, in combination with a reflection on the course itself. Particularly, I enjoyed our conversations on gender and thinking about how the formation of a culture/pop culture during the Renaissance may have influenced our present-day views on gender/expectations of women. I generally find that the way humans make boxes and labels for themselves is incredibly arbitrary and confusing, so I was hoping to reflect on that.
Not only was I inspired by this poem, but I was also inspired by a lot of video/art collages I have been seeing recently on Instagram. I find these to be really well-edited and engaging, since they seem to be both artful and tuned into shorter attention spans for social media purposes. I have been thinking a lot about social media being a marketing intern this semester for the campus dining hall, so I also wanted to take the software I have been using for work and turn it into a means for my personal creativity. For this project, I used Capcut, Audacity, and Musescore. Musescore and Audacity were notably just for the music, which I wrote maybe a few years ago now? For this project, I cleaned up the notes and changed some of the chords for the cellos. It simply felt as though it would relate better to my emotions about the semester coming to an end this way.
The video was mostly just supplementary; I started with writing this multi-genre project because–during class–I’ve started getting into this habit of writing poems based on the cool things that people say during class. Because of that, I really wanted to do something creative in this way. A lot of these throughlines exist in the poems I have shared in this post.
The first part is inspired by a piece of writing Emi shared at the November open mic; that piece was titled “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane. The second part was somewhat of a sonnet, though I skipped one stanza in writing because I really despise writing rhyming poems (though maybe a fun future challenge to make them less cliche/bad?). The third part was a poem that I wrote in class, almost entirely cobbled together from what people in class had said/been talking about. The last part was meant to harken back to the idea of an “epiphany” in my semi-sonnet. This is what I made the video about because it was my favorite poem/bit of poetry, and I thought it made a cool, snappy loop.
Ultimately, I feel as though my response to the literature is a musing, and that matters because I believe this is how we make medieval literature more accessible and understandable to people who otherwise couldn’t care less about it. I hope even in subtle ways, this work can serve as an homage and share my respect for the genres and works that fall under Medieval work. It makes me excited to see the work that will be written five hundred years from now and further on.
Works Cited
Assistant, Poems and Fancies Research. It Is Hard to Believe That There Are Other Worlds in This World. – Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies. 12 June 2017, library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/?p=892.
“In The Desert.” The Poetry Foundation, 16 Apr. 2025, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46457/in-the-desert-56d2265793693.
skeletorwun Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPlylPnCppo/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Sprockets and Springes 