We are excited to share Emory Brinson’s poem, “poem with resonance.” This piece is the Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and is included in our Spring 2023 issue: 61.3, available for purchase now. Brinson’s poem buzzes with the isolation of chronic illness, while simultaneously rendering the experience beautifully collective.
Contest judge Grace Lau describes Brinson’s poem:
The winning piece, “poem with resonance,” took a unique idea and expanded upon it in a range of wonderful ways. What does resonance have to do with seizures? With memory? This poem ties all three together. It’s science and art and nostalgia. I didn’t expect to be taken inside the minutes and seconds of a seizure the way this poem transported me, inside an MRI machine — and then, inside a time machine.
My mother and grandmother and brother and father and grandfather all inside of me,
generations of fracturing neurons meeting in my gray matter
so that with every seizure the years and stars and bodies that made me resonate.
The dead and the living and all their ghosts collecting dust in my prefrontal lobe.
Even now, this poem resonates in me.
poem with resonance
Emory Brinson
In the moments just before a seizure, breath resonates.
The seconds ring, shutter, flatten until only the suggestion of time
passing remains. I understand the body and the brain and history as living
things: through space/fingers/negative pressure they resonate
I meant to write about the way an MRI tracks the realignment of
protons as a magnetic force dances through the body,
to write a poem with the same kinetic resonance;
instead, I blink back to myself at the kitchen table,
the taste of my grandmother’s collards on my tongue,
and the stench of a hot comb sizzling against skin resonating.
I like to think of my seizures as a meeting of fault lines,
where past and present friction and each meeting quakes
After all, before I knew to call them partial/focal/seizures, I called them déjà
vu, convergences of forgotten perceptions and past lives inside me, resonating.
As it is, all I ever see is my own body and the ones it came from.
I catch glimpses and snapshots:
my grandmother as a chubby, mud-stained child,
her teeth gapped, one swinging loose against my skull, voice resonating.
The back of my head from my brother’s eyes circa ‘06, his tongue cherry red,
fingers burning ice cold against my wrist asking me to dance for the last time.
My mother too, getting down in 1993, hips swaying in a four-dollar dress, the
swing resonating in my own stiff joints.
I wake from a seizure two-stepping to Jill Scott,
Red dye 42 sweetening each stuttered breath—
every body’s history on repeat inside of me.
I can only hold what I write,
so I write about my blackness and my epilepsy in equal measures.
I am always trying
to piece myself together and they are both always resonating the body to pieces.
I seize again and again,
fall into true-false familiarity
learn to season greens/sugar tea/win at spades
watch men broker with death,
taste each violence with casual cruelty,
and still each bullet pop/hip lock/seizure resonates. What
I am trying to say is that my ill mirrors my black—the
constant needling of partial realities
as the biological and environmental collide,
the way each dual force resonates.
I romanticize my own pain so I can live with it,
so I can speak it into something physical,
into something someone else can see.
This poem the call so the response can resonate.
I am defined by every violent/inevitable/breathtaking meeting.
(The past and the present,
the known and the unknown,
two wayfaring neurons.)
Each grating glance resonates.
My mother and grandmother and brother and father and grandfather all inside
of me,
generations of fracturing neurons meeting in my grey matter
so that with every seizure the years and stars and bodies that made me resonate.
The dead and the living and all their ghosts collecting dust in my prefrontal lobe.
Here is what I think: every few weeks my brain shoves me into a past
self, so I don’t forget the scorching
so the wound smoulders instead of flickering out
so my history resonates.
Emory Brinson is a public policy and literary arts student studying at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the land of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. She is terrified of spiders and obsessed with writing about the body and its fragments. Her poetry is a meditation on the ways the past echoes throughout the physical form. She is from Charlotte, NC, and her other passions include building equitable educational systems, drinking Earl Grey tea, and playing Scrabble with her grandmother. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, and YoungArts. She was a finalist for the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and she is published or forthcoming in Sledgehammer Lit, Apiary Magazine, Olney Magazine, and more.