Running Nymph
by Ariana Reines
I was on my knees
Hacking my brains
Alone in a bone
Of unratified light
Someone downstairs
Was retching
& up thru the airshaft blew a baconlike
Breeze with notes of weed & a colorless
Wave came down through the orange
Mesh the super put up to keep out the pigeons
& doves. They beat their wings. Something
Historical was happening to me
Something already
Antique. I felt myself pushing
My hair to one side of my face. I swear
Society
Was making me do it
The voices
From the television reached me. They had
Had to pass through at least three walls.
They were like
Everything.
Everything
Overtakes me eventually
this poem is from ariana reines’ collection a sand book (the title is of the collection is a reference to a paul celan poem, shout out to last sunday). in both this book and her other works she writes a lot about the unraveling of the self that comes along with being engulfed in the commercial as well as the tangling of the self with the commercial. there is a weakness at the end of this poem that made me feel like i was falling apart with it — everything is so overwhelming it’s like a wash of noise, but the noise is also calculated and controlled.
in my mind (and this could be wrong!!) the title is a reference to the myth of daphne and apollo: apollo falls in love with daphne, he pursues her and she tries to run from him, but she can’t escape him. she begs her father (a river god) to help her, and he turns her into a tree—the only way she can escape him is to stop being human. she’s not dead, but she’s lost all her personhood. in the context of this poem this kinda mirrors that feeling of desperation to be separate from whatever you interpret “society” to be (television, landlords who keep birds away, artificial light, loud neighbors. i also could not help but think of this iconic scene from repo man) but the awareness of the enormity of it all, of the impossibility of escape. maybe the historical thing that is happening in the poem is the transformation into a tree, whatever that means to you.
xo
sam
p.s. multiple people have requested that i start to include pictures of olive in this newsletter. i actually consult her on all the poems. here she is reading this one while i was typing it up:
