Reading
by Natasha Sajé
I’m bundled in another mind
as if it were a down coat
the world thick and quiet
neurons coax
words like insects
grant them legs and wings
a swarm that rouses me
on the train or the plane
in the meadow on the beach or in bed
words riddle a raft
full of tiny holes
so I can float
I love to read! Silent reading (which began in the sixth century) especially changes the brain. This poem is my attempt to understand how it feels.
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NATASHA SAJÉ is the author of five books of poems: The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023); Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014); Bend (Tupelo, 2004); Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994); and Special Delivery (Diode Editions chapbook, 2021). Her prose books are a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014) and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir: Love, Out of Place (Trinity, 2020). Honors include the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals including Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The New York Times. natashasaje.com