You collect, you
Maizy Green
My name is Maizy Green and I am a senior undergraduate at UW majoring in English language and literature and minoring in both art history and classical studies. I am also president of the UW Poetry Club, I copy edit and write a column for the UW Daily, and teach yoga at the IMA. The poem I am submitting was primarily inspired by the writing process itself and the practice of gathering fragments of inspiration to knit together something new that you as a writer can identify with and be proud of.
You collect, you
You pull fragments like loose threads from everywhere.
You fall in love with a movie and so you
imagine strips of film looped and hanging around your fingertips, like ripples in water.
You find a cardigan in a store
and knit the color into your reveries
and into your daydreams like string in a bird nest,
like a birthday gift ribbon to lace up a sneaker,
like a beginners stitch, like fingers linked in a
promise.
Because you struggle so often to invent
​
you collect, you
conjure up a newness from all the others forgotten ruins
and then, you do, find yourself,
in the space between the first and final drafts.
And then you give all of your fragments back.