Two Poems
New Patient Intake Form
In the beginning, there was a window
I pried the blinds to make light
of my losses
I fished my hands into and shattered
the water
What a hook I was
doubled in the beginning
In the beginning My mouth
and the gasp upon impact
The skull intact
and the brain increasing
activity where the neurons
didn’t die
Slowly I filled the form
X
X
X
My torso scored in order
of severity
only a diagram
You lose your keys, too, and
believe a tenor sings
in your canal. You wake
one day midday and cannot
snooze the tuba, coiled trumpet,
now accordion flexing
its worm in your ear.
You cause a racket
up and down the building
and into the closet when you fall
as you stoop to lift
your basket of chores.
The door it drummed
on the rail, you relay
to the doctor, though you
could not hear it, or could not
hear it in your left, maybe
it is the right. You say,
I seem still
to be confused, your words
balanced in front of the other
and the other like feet,
so she conveys you
in a tube and says there can be music
if you cannot withstand the pulse.
Sara Jimenez (www.sarajimenezstudio.com) is a multidisciplinary Filipina-Canadian artist, currently living and working in New York. Through performance, installation, sculpture, and drawing, she investigates relationships between materiality and transcultural memory. Throughout her projects, she is interested in complicating and reimagining existing narratives around concepts of home, absence, and origins. Jimenez received her BA from the University of Toronto (2008) and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design (2013).