The Blanket Game

Sit against the wall, let us put the blanket over you. You feel the water on your breath moistening the cloth. You’re on Vacation in the Sahara dessert, your car breaks down, you’re walking, you’re walking and it’s getting really hot, you have to take something off, what do you take off? My shirt.

Okay, take it off and put it out from under the blanket.

You strip off your shirt, like you do most nights when the body heat produces perspiration. When his breaths against your neck cause skin erection, and clothing just becomes a speed bump to your night. You think of all the times you have done this, but taking your shirt off isn’t erroneous. You strip from your leotard to a sports bra every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Everybody then see’s that your abbs are starting to form once again at the top of your stomach, as you search for your shirt in your pile of cloths at the gym. You don’t know what the big deal is, it’s a shirt. You throw your shirt out from under the blanket.

But it’s getting hotter, you have to take something off, what do you take off?

You are now down to the decision, you’ve taken out all your earrings, and you have taken off your shirt, your tank top and both socks. I guess I’m taking off my pants. Like he did slowly, after having your permission, first pulling it from the top, over your butt, then pulls the bottom of the skinny jeans over your heals. He gives a grin as the pants are loosened and he pulls, leaving you bare. This isn’t inadmissible either, you strip every Monday, Wedneday, and Friday from pants to a leotard, leaving the same amount of skin exposed to everyone in the gym. I don’t know what the big deal is; it’s the same thing as a bathing suit and leotard. You throw your pants out from under the blanket.

But it’s still so hot, you have to take something off, what do you take off?

My bra I guess. You unsnap it with such ease, you have been doing it since you were eleven, almost ten years now, but he, he struggled. Even though you let him practice afterwards, it may be a couple more failed attempts to unhook the jail that holds your breasts in place all day, and it may be a while before he repeats the fluidity of that day in his dorm room. When you two were kissing, and I don’t mean the casual make-out session when you first wake up, but the hand on the back of the head, pushing his head in for the kiss, the pulling of the hair as you feel his blonde hair between your fingers, soft from your conditioner, standing on end from another night in a bed together. You smile at that day; teammates in the room snicker, as you search for the opening of the blanket, without letting any part of your now almost-naked body show, you’re the last to go in this game. You throw your tan and white laced bra outside the blanket.

But it’s still so hot; you have to take something off.

You debate with the speaker of the game that you are not taking anything else off. The only thing left on is your purple thong, and through a lot of debate, they assure you that they aren’t going to take the blanket off. They won’t remove the cloth and show your naked body sitting there against the wall, cold and exposed. I don’t see what the big deal is, Mason says, you’re used to taking it off from under a blanket now, aren’t you? You let the comment slide, but the words jeer at you, as you pull your left leg out, then right leg, and hide it in your pile of cloths sitting next to you, outside the blanket. All of your clothing is outside the blanket.

But it’s still so hot, you have to take something off.

There is nothing else to take off, you tell the speaker. There is always something to take off. Here are the hair ties on my wrists, she laughs, I don’t know why you would even bring one of these to the dessert anyway, it must be so hot. You look at your naked body, not the way that he did that day in his dorm room. You look at it knowing that you should run more; you should be working harder in the gym. At this point your arms should be ripping the dresses you bought at the end of the summer. Your thighs should be back to ripping old jeans; your four-pack should be a six-pack. But as you laid on his bed, the circulated air from the fans hitting your, unmasked, unprotected, unsealed, unsheltered, unveiled, visible, exhibited body, his iris’s widened, he bit his bottom lip and smiled slowly.

You however, are not lying on his bed denuded, you are under this blanket, covered, and that is when you slowly take the top of the blanket off your head. The static from your hair rises the way your arrector pili muscles do when the hairs on your arms stand on end. You figured it out, and that’s the blanket game, the speaker says as you sit with your bare butt on Mason’s floor and your back against his cold wall.

Everyone turn around so Becca can stand up and get to the bathroom, covered, the speaker says, but Mason laughs. Everyone except Evan, he’s already seen all of that. It doesn’t matter what he has seen, I want my privacy, and you scold Mason. He huffs, you’re right it doesn’t matter ‘cause Chaela and I are the only two left. It was a snarky comment about losing your virginity, which hasn’t happened yet. Evan stops you from speaking, walks you to the bathroom, and tells you to go put on more than a blanket as you hear, our sex life is none of your business, as for her virginity, we have not had intercourse therefore she is still a virgin.

You close Mason’s bathroom door as you hear Evan arguing with Mason over the state of your virginity. You have been inside her; therefore she is no longer a virgin. So what, I took her virginity, but she hasn’t taken mine? You lean your bare back to the door, sliding down and listening to their conversation. Slowly putting on your cloths. Every time you hear Mason’s high pitched-Gus Gus voice from Cinderella, when Gus Gus was fighting with the rooster over a block of cheese, you feel sick. You want to vomit, you feel the buffalo chicken dip coming back up, your heart rate speeds up, sweat starts to form above your eyebrows like it did when you just heaved three doses of vomit into the sink on the way back from Madagascar. Every time you hear his voice you think about that moment in Evan’s dorm room, and you feel nauseous, dizzy, wounded, bleeding, out-of-breath, indisposed, infected, tottering, bedridden, broken down, defective, delicate, diseased.

I hope you realize who you are talking about, and who you are talking about her to. You are talking about someone who used to be one of your best friends, and someone who is my best friend. She is my girlfriend, and what we do is none of your business, and I expect that you keep your dirt-covered nose out of our relationship. You hear a knock on the other door, and Evan walks in. Bec, I think it’s time to go. You nod, his voice like DayQuil, pushing the sickness out of your body for the day so that you can continue with daily activities for a couple of hours without spewing all over your new 2015 car.

And when you sit in your bed, thinking about Mason’s words, wondering if he was right or if Evan was right, you hold Evan’s hand and look at him, the way that he looked at your naked body that day in his dorm room. All nausea gone, and right as you start to fall asleep, it’s getting hot, and you have to take something off. So you grab the corners of your shirt, and pull it up over your head. Evan wraps his arms around you, and you throw your shirt out from under the blanket.

The One

I’m the one…

Who tells Evan to follow me out of the gym, we need to talk, who tells him what just happened, who stares off into the distance to avoid crying in front of him for the second time in a week, whose eyes are puffing up like the toe I stubbed doing a full into the resi pit, and are getting redder than my cheeks when I start tsuking into the hot foam pit in the middle of the summer, whose nose is running faster than I ever do for my vault or floor routine.

What’s wrong? Nothing, are you sure because it doesn’t seem like nothing.

No, I’m not sure.

I’m the one…

            Whose best friend is graduating, leaving me in my own chalk and sweat, wisps of bangs, hanging in my eyes, sticking to my temples, she’s leaving me sitting in leotards that are older than most of my friendships here, and in better condition than most of those friendships as well, I will sit somewhere alone in the corner of a pit, whispering gossip to Katie’s ghost because that’s all we do.

            We talk about how Danny kissed Paige at the wedding, how Danny is too judgmental to ever get a girl that would actually tolerate him long enough to date him, how Tori isn’t a fit president for the club, how money has come up missing from the club, at the hands of Tori, about who stole my Miami Cup shirt, who had the opportunity to do it, and who had the motive to do it.

            Yes, we sit in corners of the gym whispering to each other, we will look up every now and then, and making eye contact with those we shouldn’t.

            We talk about our teammates.

            We talk about our roommates.

            We talk about the events when both collide

            And we talk about our personal lives, our sex lives, or lack of, we figure out how to handle relationships, as Tyler is going out to the bars every weekend, but telling Katie to leave the parties, we ask Ethan for coffee, which will never happen because I leave for camp before I get the chance to meet up with him, and ruin the friendship while I am there.

            We talk about the events of nationals, how the people we call friends sat around the “party room” of the hotel, and decided that we hate everyone on the team because we talk about them. If only they knew that they are more family than the people related to me by blood. We look up from our little corners of the room, and snicker, they think they see us pointing fingers.

           

I’m the one scared of a skill she has been doing for three years now. I jump to the bar, swing under, some smeared chalk falls into my eyes, my legs, which are supposed to be jammed through my arms, are caught by my toes. I hang for a minute and fall to the ground, as my toenails turn purple. The only time I ever really go for it is when someone moves the springboard out from behind me after I jump.

           

I’m the one who got tricked by her best friend into drinking too much at her twentieth birthday. It’s just one shot! Katie says, handing me the pink glass, which led to me kissing Mason, in the kitchen, with the lights out, only after screaming in his face.

            Which led to me being confused, do I like him, or is he my friend? I definitely liked his lips, they were big, and soft, I like the way he smells, but God, he’s annoying. He doesn’t shut up about gymnastics, then registers for nineteen credit hours and complains about them, and who cares if a front tuck front tuck is considered a double salto pass or not? It meets the requirement, so stop talking about it.

            Which led to him keeping his distance, ignoring texts, snapchats, calls, and staying on opposite sides of the gym at all times.

            Which led to me forced hugs at meets when he decided to leave Miami early, Katie was already drunk, and I needed someone who would stay behind with me because my back hurt too much to go out. I ended up going out anyway, leaving the ice pack and the heating pad on the bed, which was a mistake. In fact when we went out, we walked a mile to the party, by the time we got there, I hated Katie for making me walk a mile while limping from my back screaming at me as it’s being stabbed by some possible budging disc, for making me go to the party, and then walking fifty yards in front of me, and I called Stephanie who goes to school at Miami. She took me to Spot’s, and my night got better from there because somehow whenever I meet her friends, I click with them really well, but it’s never the other way around, with anybody.

            The fact that Mason and I are no longer friends to the Sophomore Squad being formed at Miami, when Mason was avoiding me, so he spent his time with Michaela and Deshawn, they called themselves the Sophomore Squad, curtsey of Mason, even though Katie and I were sophomores and not in it.

           

I’m the one who sits in Katie’s shadow, as she gets the credit for being Vice President last year. Actually it was me who was Vice President, but nobody acknowledges it because I didn’t do anything. I didn’t carry twenty-fve pound boxes full of warm ups and team t-shirts across campus I didn’t come to the bank to help switch the cards over, I didn’t help host parties, or make decisions on the car to nationals, and I definitely didn’t do anything to get Katie to nationals. Maybe I didn’t do anything because I was getting tired of the clubs drama. The miscommunication, the freshmen asking me, the vice president, what our hotel rooms were. Becca, what rooms are we staying in? I’m not sure where to put my bags. I’m sorry Sarah and Kristen, but Rachel hasn’t told me anything. You can follow me to one of the rooms, but I don’t know where any of the other rooms are. What time is the party tonight? They ask, are we going to get dinner? What time are we leaving for the meet? What session do we compete, is the vault the same as the one at the gym? Will we be able to move the bar settings? What corner do I start in for my floor routine? I don’t know, I’m the Vice President and was told nothing. Maybe it was all too much, the screaming in the face, that led to the kiss that led to the messed up friendship, that led to the three main members of the Sophomore Squad forming, while I was busy taking care of Katie forcing wine and cranberry juice combo down my throat, while I was busy with essays about photographers, making videos of crouching the beam for the club, writing them into stories that happen in the gym, telling stories of what happened over the summer when Bethany went to Mexico and cast a demon out of a woman, figuring out what to minor in, graphic communications I guess, making videos of OSU, making videos of Miami, making Videos of GVSU, club fund raisers, making club decisions on dues and t-shirt amounts, who gets a new leotard since funding is no more, how much do we charge the freshman, and what about our flights to nationals for 2016. Come on, come party with me! Katie begs, but my back hurts! I yell, but she pulls me out. Come on! Have some fun!

           

I ditch Katie at Nationals because my Dad is a drunk, and I don’t wanna drink. It’s currently tearing my family apart, why would I want anything to do with it? I’m tired of the pornographic images I receive at four in the morning, receiving the texts demeaning my mother, calling her out for being too tired to clean, the comments about my mother, and their problems in the bedroom, my Mom calling me to ask for advice, getting the news from my sister that I can’t go home, Mom, Beth and Josh had to leave my Dad at the house, they are living with Aunt Pam and Uncle Andy for a couple of weeks. I’m tired of being touchy-feely with people I roll my eyes at only because I had a few glasses of something us kids call “adult drinks”. So I’m sorry if I don’t want to drink.

            I ditch Katie at Nationals because Katie has been sober long enough to be hung over and compete.

            Because she doesn’t shut up about how great of a roommate I am.

            Because she is strangling me in this embrace right now.

            Because she was flinging barbeque chicken at me during the banquet.

            Because Mason wiped her red, meat covered hands off, while I video taped it.

            Because I don’t wanna be around her anymore.

            Because I got a call saying Grandpa is gasping for breath.

            Because he might not make it through the night.

            Because I wish Katie would be my friend instead of my drinking buddy.

            Because I’m forcing myself into a new squad. Squad up.

            Because she’s graduating December 2015, and laughs about it.

            Because she’s planning on leaving, Michigan to North Carolina.

            Because she doesn’t care that she’s leaving me to fend for myself in this club.

            Because graduating is all she talks about.

            Because she is my best friend and I don’t want to hate her by the time Nationals is over.

            I’m the one that when she ditches Katie, she forces herself into the Sophomore Squad, hello four new “best friends.”

            The school year ends and the official Junior Squad forms, I’m in.

           

I’m the one who said she’s gonna stay single, and then falls in love with Evan.          

           

I’m the one who invites her boyfriend’s roommate to club events, then stomps out of the gym when teammates say that he can’t come.

           

I’m the one who yells at Mason in her room because I’m going to OSU and Miami, whether I pay for my flight or not. I’m sorry, but I’ve paid my competition fees, the money is coming. It’s due the forth, and I turn twenty-one on the fifth, there is nothing I can do; I cannot request the money any sooner. I yell, using my hands to show the deadlines. No, it does not make any sense for me not to be able to compete just because I will be a couple days late. I don’t care Mason, I’m competing whether Rachel is okay with it or not.

           

I’m the one who complains about lack of communication, is told that she has to be at the meetings even though I just take care of the social media, I never get told the time or place of the meetings, I don’t get any say in the decisions that is made as a club, I just get to sit and listen, when Tori is asked who was vice president last year, she says that she did it by herself, okay.

            Am I even a part of the now Junior Squad?

            Was I ever a part of the Junior Squad?

            Don’t say that Becca, they love you. Evan wipes away my tear as I stand outside of the gym, my bare feet on the cold tile floor.

            Evan, to them, I’m just…

           

I’m the one who makes videos that are too long and tells people that they are pretty on Instagram.

           

            

Promises

Porch lights turn on with any sudden movement from our bodies, summer is turning into fall, and the air is clawing at our appendages, drying out our lips, painting the cartilage on our ears red, making our noses run and toes curl under in our shoes. Stephanie speaks in her usual mannerisms, flailing her arms around, using her hands to tell stories, stories of falling to the ground when she ran into a guy that she met at a concert. It is stories like this that make our stomachs ache, and it impossible to risk taking a drink, fearing that it might end up all over each other.

            The porch is still white, they haven’t painted it yet, and the metal flower patterned chairs leave imprints on our legs and butts, the kind of imprints leotards leave when I leave them on too long, but when we stand up from the chairs, it’s like pulling the leotard off. It pulls against your skin until it realizes that it is not a part of your body, and lets go, giving relief to the imprinted parts. Stephanie ends the story without taking a breath, I stood up with my tray on the counter and I saw him starring at me in confusion. So I dropped back down to the ground. We doubled over, faces pressed against the patterned metal table, choking on our spit and snot running out of our noses, laughing to the point of tears.

            We know nothing else but laughter, because we are young enough that our hair colors are all still natural. I have not colored my hair 4RV, Chloe has not had the chop yet, Sophia’s braces are still on, and Stephanie’s hair is past her shoulders. Becca, that laugh, breathe. You sounded, breathe. Just like your mother, breathe. The smile stops, turning my wide stretched cheeks into straight dry lips, the cracks in my lips closing back up as if they were never separated, my corrugator wrinkles, bringing my eyebrows close together, my orbicularis oris rises. The look that says, yeah, I remember that night on the trampoline all those years ago, the bugs were buzzing around the porch light, we were whispering because your parents bedroom window was right in front of us, you were telling me family secrets, such as why my Dad married my Mom, for the money, or the real reason we moved back to Ohio, family services. Stephanie raises her head. I wondered. You are the only one that knows that conversation took place, and it will remain that way.

            That’s cute, she laughs just like her mom! We put our cups of hot chocolate into the kitchen sink, take a seat around the living room, cover ourselves with old quilts made by Chloe and Sophia’s grandma when she had the free time to make them these kinds of things. We pull out the beanbags that take up a fifth of the living room, we let Suzanne turn on the worship music, we pull out our bibles, our notebooks, our pens, the book we are reading Every Young Girls Battle, Sophia puts popcorn on the table, chocolate-chip cookies, Root beer, glass cups, vanilla ice cream, and spoons.

            So you remember? Stephanie whispers without turning her head to look at me while everybody is preoccupied with the food. I nod slowly up and down; I remember asking her, making her promise me. I’m sure I’ve done it twice, one when we were four and five, I’m not even sure of the circumstances that lead to it, it was not a good night though probably a lot of yelling, throwing of inanimate objects or animated objects, I can tell you, it wasn’t a good night. The second time was on the trampoline when we were seven and eight, thinking that college was lifetime away, an impossibility, that my escape would be death, not college, that it would never change, not that it ever did. I came home with her from church one Wednesday night with the cicadas chirping in the trees, the windows of their mini van down, we were reciting bible verses for next week because we were young and that was our highest priority, but when we arrived at the house it was one of the first times I had ever been there. They had just moved in, it’s the same house she lives in now. The one with the big pool that we would swim in all summer, and jump into from the roof of their one story house. The house that was simple, but yet it was everything that I wanted and she got to have, we snuck out to the trampoline, laying on our backs, I explained how my day went. It started at home, with inanimate objects flying. First laundry that was sitting on the couch, socks, shorts, t-shirts, pants, then onto the empty pitcher sitting on the coffee table, the play station remotes sitting by the T.V., the mail on the counter, the shoes by the door, the toy mouse on the stairs, the vase at the top of the stairs, the picture frame hanging outside the upstairs bathroom, the coats in the closet, the glass owl that I put all of my change in that sits on my desk, as it shatters against the wall, and all the change falls to the golden carpet, the yellow bumble-bee bag of nail polish, the bottle of hand sanitizer on my dresser, the pictures that are framed sitting on my dresser – pictures of days that are way better than this day - and finally her spit in my face, as I hide in the corner on the top bunk of the white metal bed. It creaks under her weight, and I hide under the cherry blankets, shaking, crying, and determined not to yell back, not to make it worse.

            We then went to church, where the private then became public.

            You’re keeping your promise, right? I whisper to her, making my root beer float.

            To never let you turn into your Mom? Until the day I die.

            

Portfolio Introduction

This portfolio is comprised of three pieces, each drawing from different prompts given throughout the semester. The first, “Promises” is drawn from daily writing practices, “The One” is in apprenticeship to Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and his use of anaphora and lists. The final piece, The Blanket Game” is from a prompt given in class about taking what is over-used, cliché or corny and making it into something authentic, such as Kevin Killian’s Argento Series. From the very first week of class, we have been discussing the idea of self-description, how it impacts our identity as writers, and how it is presented in our writing. Each one of the pieces focuses on identity, politicizing our writing, and how our social constructs uses interpellation on us on a daily basis.

            The piece, “Promises,” was comprised of daily writing, pulling from the prompt of memories of church, or church events. I started thinking about seventh grade when my Small Group (bible study) would meet at my best friends house, and that one night when I was reminded of the promise I made my cousin, Stephanie, make to me.  This promise has stayed with me growing up, and has shaped my identity because although she is my mother, and I care for her deeply, I still have those memories, and the feeling to not want to be like her, and to do better. The piece takes what is private, and personal, and once again makes it social. Taking place in a setting like a bible study, a place where people tend to think that these things, these types of promises, and bad memories of our parents should not be brought up or cross our minds. Yet, there we were, trying to figure out who I am in relation to my mother, who my friends think I am in relation to my mother, and where my identity lies when I am separated from my mother.  In her introduction, “Words of Selves”, Denise Riley says about identity “the resulting politics of identity are, by their nature, bound to fall short of their promised redemption” (5). So trying to find the identity away from my mother, and through all these different avenues of who people are saying I am in relation to her, was bound to fall short from actually answering the questions of identity in relation to my mother, especially on the page. However, Riley continues,

“In this sense, my awkward navigations to become, coupled with my constitutional failure to fully be are what actually enable political thinking and language rather than marking some lamentable shortcoming in my ‘politicization’. This makes briefly for an air of paradox: that some lack of politicization (where that term is taken in contemporary sense to imply the keen embrace of some progressive identity) might be needed, in order for there to be mobility, and life within political thought” (5).

            What Riley is stating is that my failure to answer these questions of “who am I away from my mother?” and “who am I in relation to my mother” (and so on), is what enabled the ability to make this piece move from that private night on the trampoline when I made Stephanie promise it the first time, to something social like a bible study. And Riley argues that some lack of politicization might be needed for the piece to move, and to give the piece life within our political thoughts, and I would agree with her. The piece is holding back on politicization, if it were not, the first time the promise occurred would not have been so private. However, it was private, and then the situation was brought into a public atmosphere. Showing politicization, but at the same time, a lack there of.

            The second piece “The One” is taken from apprenticing Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in his poem he uses anaphora and lists in a way that makes the reader question if the language really has the ability to escape them. However, instead of questioning if the language can escape the lists and anaphora, I wanted to see if I could escape what my teammates think of me. Each of those, “I am” statements are things that I have heard talked behind my back, when friends confide in me about others confiding in them about me. I am the one who Katie is leaving behind, and she doesn’t seem to care, I’m the one who kissed Mason last year, and he still holds it against me, on and on. These roles, are labels that I have been called into by people who are supposed to be my friends.

            The frustration that comes from this kind of personal interpellation comes out on the page, and in Poetry and Knowledge, Aimé Césaire says, “it is not merely with his whole soul it is with his entire being that the poet approaches the poem. What presides over the poem is not the most lucid intelligence, or the most acute sensibility, but an entire experience: all the women loved, all the desires experienced, all the dreams dreamed… All lived experience. All the possibility” (47). So when approaching an apprenticeship to Césaire, it meant not just leaving the little things out, but giving the poem every piece that it deserved. Not just the grudges, the frustration, the regrets, the questions, but bits and pieces of the stories. When the freshman ask where our rooms are, what time the party is at and all of those nagging questions that I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t leave out. I had to give the entire experience like Aimé Césaire said, and that piece is the result.

             The Blanket Game was the final piece that I started, drawing from Argento Series as a prompt, but using Claudia Rankine’s construct of the “you.” The inspiration came from Argento Series when we were in class and Leah asked, “How can something so cheesy inspire something so authentic?” From there, I looked up what makes movies clichéd or cheesy, and nothing seemed more cheesy than a Christmas party. Although the fact that it was at a Christmas party was never mentioned within the piece the prompt was inspiring enough to bring it to life and make the events of the Christmas party authentic.

            The piece not only mimics politicization, what is personal (nakedness) and turns it into something social (such as being naked in room full of teammates), but it also uses Claudia Rankine’s construct of the “you,” to make a politicized piece very isolated. The blanket game is a very personal situation, very private under the confines of the blanket where you are stripping down until you realize that it’s the blanket that you are supposed to be taking off, nothing else. Yet when you are reading it you find yourself surrounded in a room full of teammates, but isolated under the blanket. Using the word “you” just emphasizes the isolation, the idea of being the last to go in this game, and getting naked in front of friends, but hidden also emphasizes the politicization that is used.

            While reading the piece, there is a sense of unease, between the events of the game, and the comments that are being made throughout it. However, the unease of the piece, and the different emotions that it draws on, comes from the guilt that is played around with throughout the story. In her introduction, “The Words of Selves”, Denise Riley says, “unease lies on the verge of guilt, a condition elastic enough to encompass all too many definitions, of which one is that gnawing feeling of having failed according to rules that I did not make myself” (17). When she writes that, she is talking about failing language according to the rules that we did not write. However, this pertains to the piece because of the guilt that is experienced while being naked under the blanket while hearing those comments, coming from teammates. Those comments are saying that I failed but only failed at rules set up by team members, and when this feeling of failure becomes evident, there is unease for the reader.

            The concept of identity that is searched in this piece is the nudity, how it felt, and the question that Mason brought up as what makes one a virgin? Many people tend to label themselves as “non-virgin” and “virgin” but that identity is screwed up when it comes to the argument between the two young men.

            The final aspect of the portfolio that resides throughout all of the pieces is the lists and anaphora. Although they come and go throughout pieces, maybe with little words of repetition, or the long list of things she threw at me, those formal features are there, and each time that anaphora is used, the pieces seem to restart. 

Works Cited

Césaire, Aimé, Clayton Eshleman, and Annette Smith. "Poetry and Knowledge." Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 1990. N. pag. Print.

"The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony | Denise Riley." The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony | Denise Riley. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2015.