One Poem

Autobiography

I wanted to write a poem about my life
So I took a walk down to the canal
With a friend to talk and listen to music
Before a reading, it was humid, early August
Dark clouds in the sky, a sort of oblique
Foreshadowing, she handed me a menthol
And read me a poem she had written
Hunter - I tell you / one thinks - one does it -
As if anticipating my question
About autobiography and its inability
To transcend the local, interior time
Being the form our inner experiences take
I explained that I’d found it indulgent
To write about my life like that
But was now bumping up against the inevitable
Barrier that is the edited experience
Of one’s life, the way we replicate it
The fragmentation inherent in that
We talked for awhile about what it might mean for me
To write my life, in contrasts that animate the latent
Intent in the poem, she suggested a framework
Which I took to mean as a methodology
For grounding the self, the discursive contours
By which the notion of self, the past, is actualized
A way of navigating the dense singularity
That surrounds work and living
The world we live in, its exigencies
I told her I’ve found it painful all my life
To hold the past up to the present
Like a mind comprehending light through stained glass
The way the light is filtered
Through systems of meaning, broken ontologies
To write about my life
To buckle beneath the weight of what that could mean
To touch the flame of potentiality manifest
In a certain brightness
Quilting the music over every moment
I guess I’m mostly just afraid of what might happen
If I let myself be vulnerable enough
Within the right framework
Listening to the world recalibrate
Beneath the glowing embers of what art is
In the gone currency of memory
Utopia or a future uncancelled
Expelled in the conscious gestures that mark a turn
The performance of living
The performance of the poem
It’s phrasal, I mean, life is
Like how could I actually write a poem approximating life
This consistent digital hail clipping the brain
Like how could I accurately render the social
Private instances of syncopated levity
The phenomenon of music
A necessary intimacy in that
Bodies etched into time by their needing food, sleep
And the lyric, as a tool of the state
As a kind of access point into the nostalgic
The violent associations that come with that
Does the lyric get to work as a vehicle for transcendence?
The uneven amplification of the voice, the void
The work of autobiography
In the work of art
The compulsive work of memory, narcotized, incidental
I want to understand the uses of that
And the cruelty of art, or as Fred Moten puts it
“the cold, funerary / origin of the work / of art.”
I come to the poem draped in the bright curtain of instability
Locking the past into place
Along the ridges where reality is vague enough
To tap the moment back into a kind of ceaseless present
A moment that I hand to you
In a gesture that precedes my doubt
My past lit by a lie
And the night streaked with what?
That’s my flower there in the liminal
Blue flower crushed in the street like a vision
A fixed perspective, clotting and dense
My heart becomes an arrow
Held static in the high beams of sunlight
Dragging me back through what I understood
As a kind of personal reckoning
Broken into form
The past divided up into seasons
Glittering, fungible
And from the bank of the canal we watched the clouds
Advance like an insurgent dyad
Overtaking the ambient hum of the music
And this, I realized, is the framework
To assimilate one’s experiences
Into something tangible enough
To lean up against the outer life
To walk back the sharp radius of a dead feeling
In the abstraction of memory
To come closer to the impulse
Becoming what the birds are
Contours in the symmetry of a day
To write the body back through
The extended gradient of a gone feeling
To push one’s self up against the warped
Surface of clarity, to stand outside
In the rain, draped in all that circumstance
While the world evaporates
On a distant axis that is the localized
Space between a memory
And the event itself, to rewrite
One’s life in the service of others
To provide a space for figuring, refiguring
The aesthetic experience of rendering the self
Within the framework of the poem
A kind of beauty in rearticulation
A scaffolding upon which
Someone might drape their own experiences
Bright circumstantial phenomena
Entering through the I, I disclose everything

∩

Hunter Larson is a poet from the midwest currently living in western Massachusetts. He is the author of the chapbooks American Mystic (b l u s h / Illicit zines, 2026), Desire Lines (Press Brake, 2025) and was the winner of the Poetry Project’s 2023 Lisa Brannan Prize. He co-edits the poetry journal and critical archive Little Mirror.