For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION]

Dan Lau asks, If an animal lives inside the spaces of your poem, what would it be and can you describe it?

Mg Roberts responds,

Through an excerpt of something yet to arrive:

The Earth is lengthwise.

Arriving like a dissolved star, a collection of sounds interpreted or divined through curvature.

Folded under now in gesture, a starfish’ hard exterior overshoots the break in the rocks.

Tomorrow is still March.

[POEM]

from UNEARTH

I begin again with omissions. I begin with the fragment, which will never occur again, even in repetition.

I begin as a series of small bones projecting towards articulation. Finding something to say, linking direction and nothing at the same time: a vertebra. I want to write a book that describes the end of the disk, a small hole through which the spinal cord passes. I want you to be able to see it as I do. Pulsing.

In the peripheral landscape each parallel line attempts connection, searches for correspondence in dirt. Occupying a strange place I find myself physically insignificant in black and white stills reworked, bending.

Endlessly looped, and silent.

[BIO]

Born in Subic Bay, Philippines, Mg Roberts is the author of not so, sea; and she’s about to have her third baby real, real soon.