Claire Schwartz

CROSS-EXAMINATION

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
—Czesław Miłosz

 what is a country but the drawing of a line
—Safia Elhillo 

What is a nation which does not save
poetry? What is a poem but the gathering
of lines? What is a line but people
waiting? What is waiting but satisfaction
suspended? What is a break but a suspension
of breath? What is breath when the body
is broken? What is a line break but hunger
with no mouth? What is a nation where
no one is hungry? What is hunger but people
wanting? What is a line but desire given form?
What is a people but a form of survival? What
is a form without an outside? What is a country
without an other? What is a poem but a gesture
of reaching? Can a poem save a nation? Can a poem
survive a nation? Can a poem survive a savior? Can
a poem feed a people? Can a body survive
a people? What do you call a body bent in labor? Who
is this poem working for? What is a poem that leaves
people hungry? What is a poem that leaves people
wanting? When wanting takes leave, where
is the question? How can a poem be
when there is no question?

CLAIRE SCHWARTZ is a PhD candidate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale. Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A chapbook, bound (Button Poetry), is forthcoming.