“The Air Itself is One Vast Library” is the Third Place Winner of Room’s 2024 Poetry Contest, as judged by Rafeef Ziadah. You can find the full list of winners, and what Rafeef had to say about each winning piece, here.
THE AIR ITSELF IS ONE VAST LIBRARY
…on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. -Charles Babbage
the air rushes inside
my chest but my lungs cannot
fully exhale.
they weigh
the chaos of oxygen and CO2.
in asthmatic pause
I read the atmosphere, wheeze on stuck words,
carcinogenic and sweet
whisked inside me.
my chest is a temple of incense
shimmering sound, a repository of speech
once polluted with cigarette plumes
and fumes of drunken words
—now tempered
by wildfire ash.
leaden weight of alphabets
—idioms like eco-anxiety and alt right—
compress my chest
so I take drags from prescribed steroids
and Vancouver’s long breath
of rain.
despite the captive air in my chest
my foul words leak grime reels
of negative self talk
loitering the back of my teeth
—un-hermetic verbiage that resists soap.
I resist having my complaints accrete
in the karmic scrabble of soundprints
that waft back with gossip smog
bellowing industry speak, thick
with over-talkers and fear-mongering
blowhards who unleash detritus in the sky
stirred by gull wail contrail,
only to snow down again on the skytrain
tracks creaking with city
pigeon wings.
it’s easy forget about the mechanics
of breathing as reckless,
exhaling what I feel
until my airways constrict.
so easy to be stoked by trolls.
I sieve through the haze
of MAGA & TERF
cast over skylines and
make friction with my teeth to burn it up
before it takes my chest captive I exhale
to the sound of robin chirr
and leaf flutter breeze
to weave a benign tapestry.
I want my words to alight brief
—take flight in poetry like pearls of rain
at the top of the palate
that susurrate subtly as waves of displaced atoms.
I want no trace
left of me but to drift into particle waves
and ride their signature’s decay
and my words that are fists
can break past the stratosphere and bloom in solar wind,
disintegrate
from sentence, to phrase, to loose words,
rounded off in phonemes,
diffused into ॐ,
into a clear resonance like a prayer in this body
breathing faulty
in each bronchial branch
holding a catalogue of love.
