Bonus Poem : Witness. Target = Rubble. by Lori Shridhare

Witness. Target = Rubble.
by Lori Shridhare

Published in Merion West, February 2025

I write as both the witness and the experiencer.

We appear as two separate individuals.

We are not.

 

1. Witness is now the living trace of this encounter.
   -Gert-Jan van der Heiden

 

Echoes of seismic blasts penetrate this skin of memory.

I am under.

Boulders on my back. Polygonals, squares, round. 

Slabs.

We try to hide from what our vision sees, but we can’t.

What comes next is a crumpled blank page.
Subterranean dust.

Wet fragments.

I hear “You’re next.” 

You say, “Come closer, my love. If only with your eyes.”

 

Waves of moments

wash our bodies

clearing the lens

for presence.

Droplets taste of 

dew, honey, sea salt,

melting, in movement, 

in stillness.

The essence of seeing

you remains.

 

 

2. The sense of trauma can thus be understood as a particular risk of the way in which a subject matter in a more general sense draws a witness near to or into itself.
   --Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Why are the parents missing?

We have a family with no elders.

These ruins can’t make a neighborhood.

Darkness and the movements within the basement shatter what’s above.

Within the clouds of perception, sensing an unknown fluidity,

while this body walks blindfolded, feeling objects in the dark.

 

I bow down to what’s below my feet.

All we have is ground to stand on.

What happens when we lose the ground?

I witness what’s below through my inner eye – the only capacity for sight left.

 

Underbelly of the earth

absorbs screams,

consecrates the silence.

Aftershocks awaken,

bring water to dry tears of

a sleeping world

as we become the

living cells of the dying.

We thought there couldn’t be anything more.

But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods.

Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.

I can’t feel my back.

The rest of us dissolved. 

The torment is shredding us.

Only the parents can punish the remaining children.

Forceful strike on my beloved’s arm.

Waving our arms to nobody

The flights out of here don’t exist.

We’ve become a landscape nobody can dream of.

Don’t kill that which can’t exist anymore. 

 

3. Your very body is the matrix of crossings too dense for language to articulate. 

You are multiple. You are indeterminate. You are pluriversal.

-Bayo Akomolafe

 

Joy that absolves all of this.
Here, sip from my salivation.

People’s hearts don’t die in the rubble.

Prison g