I am writing to you from the heart of the empire, so much the heart it does not see itself for what it is. Who speaks for me from here? Am I nobody, or nobody’s mark? One eye bleeding. Grasping for where the wound came from, where the weapon speaks. There in the dark-not-dark he touches everything he loves, looking for danger, touching fleece and fleece, known and known. Underneath each, a soldier.

after Audre Lorde and Amorak Huey

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Prompt

Audre Lorde writes in her essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” Write an epistolary poem (a poem in the form of a letter) to the words you do not yet have.

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Jeremy Michael Reed has published poems and essays in Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English for Westminster College in Missouri.