Like I’ve been waiting for permission.
—Carmen Maria Machado, “Real Women Have Bodies”
You slip out of your blue-collar monotony and break through
standard-sized button holes. You name your choices:
a sense of time, proper words, or belief in objectivity.
You chose sense of time as focus and as a discipline.
This makes you believe that you can reclaim meaning.
Time feels like a soft demand—venerated submission.
Dedicated, you leave behind a destabilizing body.
This way of being, an inversion, becomes its own conversation
in response to and in relationship with finding expression.
Attending, active, alert: dilated attention.
This explanation means time was devoured.
What a sense of honest ownership that must feel like.
Cache Culture 