Arsenal 4

“I wanted condensed color in places then color degraded and bleeding out into other spots. In order to perform this poem successfully, I try to concentrate on skating only its silences. I break the line quickly to make it fall tall and thin, like the Watts Towers. This way I can identify the silences streaming through a little easier as I’m reading. My partner recently asked me to read this poem as I was preparing to perform, but he couldn’t remember the title. When I asked him to describe it, he said, ‘You know, the poem where you describe all the colored gasses.’”
—Cedar Sigo

Thanks to Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Cruel Futures (City Lights Publishers, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read more about Giménez Smith and our guest editors for the year.