At Night, the Wake (After Alice Notley)

Even now, the wakeI forget the waves or I wish I was thereI may have decided that theWake will come yetOr I have thought so. I’m going to try floatingAll I need is my back and breathEven ifEven stillEven nowI wrote this poem years ago, when I first arrived in California at UCSF. I felt my arrival was in the wake of past decisions and experiences, namely evacuating Hurricane Ida in New Orleans and love found and lost. I wrote this a week before reading Christina Sharpe’s "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being," which fundamentally shifted how I understood the wake and what it might hold, leading me to abandon this poem for some time. This poem is written after Alice Notley’s “At Night the States.”