I Am Become the News of the Day, by Hannah Silverstein

Aphoristic Currents, by Meryl McMaster (Canada). 2013. Click on image to visit artist site.

I Am Become the News of the Day
 
Imagine a dancer spinning, spinning,
until the white chalk at her burning feet
spools itself into a thread and coils out
from her throat like the snaked coils
of a sun-fired pot in which a cobra
might or might not be sleeping--
 
Now say that the chalk was newsprint;
the coils, words, black ink spilled
in thin lines and banner fonts
along a plane reaching corner to corner,
bleeding almost off the edge,
which is to say, the world--
 
And those words, spiraling out
by centrifugal force, are not words only,
but time; and not any time, but now:
this moment, this, this, this, spooling
fast as a reporter can file
her version of the story or
the dancer can spot and pull her body
around and around and around--
 
And if you could still a single instant
from this motion, capture it unblurred
so that even some of the coiled-snake words--
damage, maybe, or crossroad, or even
free--were legible, if not intelligible,
wouldn’t it look like this?
 
With a magnifier you might read a clue
to the crossword, or the fine strands
of the dancer’s hair--
 
Is she not Atlas, bearing
the flattened weight of this moment’s
map, which is to say, of the world
as we know it now, and now, and now?
 
See: how ink and paper-whiteness
have spread like pox over her young face,
yoked as she is like an ox
to the plow of the current, or a planet
orbited by rings of water and ash--
 
Her lips are set, her red-rimmed eyes
look out—to what? What future
allows such burdens?
 
The weight of it, of paper.
​
​Hannah Silverstein

Hannah Silverstein lives in Vermont. Her writing has appeared in Si Señor, The New Guard, and SWWIM Every Day.