When bone became
inside my jelly clear;
My fin,
an arm;
my gill,
a lung enclosed;
When dryness
spread across
my face
and, near
The sun, flushed red while pigments rose;
When air from nostrils
spilled hot over my lips,
A thousand hairs erupted
from within
And overflowed like nails from fingertips,
Then felt useless,
oppressed by clothes,
and thinned;
When “joy” and “hate” became
of moans and barks;
When words grew over every sense
and made
My chest-rise
a “spirit,”
this sunrise
an “art”;
When patterns
locked between mouths,
and that trade
Turned one habit, tradition;
another, law—
I find no layer
denies me:
I am raw.
Like many of the other poems, I was drawn to this one by the collage and the odd structure of the sonnet. But after reading the poem, once, then twice, I found the language touching and, just as the title suggests, raw. Part of the emotional impact I felt came from the unusual form of the sonnet, and the choice to put certain words on certain lines together emphasized that imagery, or that moment. For me, the imagery of the different body parts described in such detail in this structure elevated the emotional impact I felt. The relation of the limbs of a human to the limbs of a fish were at first really bizarre, but in the context of this poem representing the rawness in humans, it reminded me of life at its most basic state, before humans existed when the dominant multicellular organisms on the planet were fish. This callback to the past is also mentioned when the sun becomes the pigments in the skin which emphasized that raw quality. All of these kind of ancient comparisons (not sure how else to describe it) end when the speaker reveals they are oppressed by clothes, which to me, was akin to humanity’s evolution from its raw state as homo sapiens, to the complicatedly structured society we live in now, and how that construct severely hampers that raw quality present since the beginning of multicellular life. In the second half of the poem, I feel that these raw qualities described in the first half are transformed from focusing on the physical aspects to the more metaphorical and emotional ones. The specific comparisons conveyed a relationship between these more tangible things and the raw elements of humanity that remain largely unchanged, just like the fish (if that makes sense). All in all, this was a poem I greatly enjoyed.
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