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Posts Tagged ‘misophonia’

The Misophonic Poetry Teacher Is Confronted by the World

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 1, 2024| 17 Comments »


 
 
I would rather not listen to the dehydrator fan
as it hums in the back room, a sound
some might call white noise, but
I hear it as if it’s neon bright whirring inside me,
as if I, too, am being dried
like thin slices of Bartlett pear,
as if I, too, am losing all my juice
and becoming a shriveled version of myself.
And now the roar of a distant plane layers
above the dehydrator hum like a rogue choir member
with poor pitch insisting on a solo.
Enter the crinkle of the chip bag
as my good husband comes into the kitchen
to become a human vector for crunching.
And now it’s all assault: the cat as she mewls,
the lumber trucks thundering by like subwoofers,
the gurgle and burble of the fish tank pump—
and I’m the fool who minutes ago said to the class,
Let’s be receptive and hear with our whole body,
believing I might fall more in love with the world
just by listening into this moment like the poet
we just read who wrote about the sweet communion
she achieved just by quietly listening to the bees
as they swirled around her in a baptism of holy buzz,
but damn, it’s so loud, and overwhelmed
with the racket of it all, I whisper-shout oh fuck it,
joining my curse to this collective clamor of thwack
and drip and rumble and tick, and I’m part
of it all, though not how I’d planned, invited in
by each thing relentlessly singing itself into being,
all of it beckoning me, too, to sing, sing, sing.

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