Interesting story… written in red ink at the top of my mother’s paper …Is this even true? 1972—Eighth Grade American Indian Unit even then, her faultless cursive recounting her father’s recounting of Sitting Bull’s murdertoday we learnto say who we arein Zoom Dakota classtiles enclose faces COMMAND + SHIFT + A unmute shapes move through mouths Damákhota Oregon hemátaŋhaŋ ye Tuktédaŋ omáwapi šni ye afterward I forget everything walking the dog past beautiful people lifting weights, stretching by the bronze bust of Leif Erikson glistening populace of the open field shadows keep casual intimacy deepen in overlaps Homework: what is all the information you can give someone about yourself and what would your introduction sound like? half-second misaligned perfecting an echo’s echobut my legs are in running shorts and my face is on dating apps and I check the box foron government forms ergo I am in any residual sense phenotypically slash culturallyslash in terms of my rearing as well as in case of receipt of cultural or academic capitalfrom the largely establishment that is to say I am to any glance passing or otherwise in the documentary a fisherman’s voice-over we are living out long-term genocide he slits a salmon points to good flesh the terms of ness are long-term and to be is endpoint of every room that has included mefor being meekly and legibly “finally, there was the groundless shame of the inadvertent impostor” wrote Adrian Piper (she looked to the gaze but wasn’t ) if I wrote in on paperit would look like
8.5 x 11
Feature Date
- January 8, 2024
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“8.5 x 11” from REMOVAL ACTS: by Erin Marie Lynch.
Published by Graywolf Press on October 3, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Erin Marie Lynch.
Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
All rights reserved.
Erin Marie Lynch is the author of Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, 2023). Her writing appears in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. A PhD candidate at University of Southern California, she lives in Los Angeles.
"Erin Marie Lynch’s debut poetry book, Removal Acts, is a deeply personal, formally inventive investigation into history, ancestry, and loss. . . . Throughout the work, Lynch’s language remains precise, compassionate, inquisitive, and vulnerable."
—Mathangi Subramanian, BOMB Magazine
"Lynch interweaves the stories of two of her ancestors with her own recovery from bulimia to explore the twinned legacies of historical and self erasure. The result is a moving meditation on 'removal' in its many forms that melds together the personal and historical to craft a testament to Indigenous resilience and survival in the face of eradication."
—Eliza Browning, Electric Literature
"Removal Acts is a rich and fraught collection that confronts the legacy of displacement and erasure with searing honesty. Debut author Erin Marie Lynch does not shy away from hard questions, including her right to some of the stories in her collection. . . . Removal Acts combines technical prowess and attention to craft with deliberate experimentation, signaling Lynch as a poet with talent that far surpasses expectations for a debut author."
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question
"By compiling absences, silences, and censures, Lynch exposes the colossal scale of settler violence on the American continent. She wields punctuation marks—brackets, arrows, and spaces—like weapons."
—Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet
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