Poetry / Jessica Nirvana Ram 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve always want­ed to write about why I became an organ donor but I nev­er knew the con­text with­in which I want­ed to write about it until I reached a point beyond sui­ci­dal ideation. To look back at my thought process with clear­er eyes, with growth, helped me recon­tex­tu­al­ize this idea of offer­ing one­self up. It is pret­ty nor­mal in my poems to offer up body parts as metaphor so to think about it more lit­er­al­ly it was like see­ing through fog a bit. Like oh, I’m loved dif­fer­ent­ly now, I don’t have to sec­tion myself off for love. It is giv­en, freely and this love makes me want to stay alive. How lib­er­at­ing it was to reach the end of this poem and say: I want to live. There’s also some­thing about this form, the back­slash­es, that mir­rors the con­tent for me. This sec­tion­ing, like pieces com­ing togeth­er to form a whole, how there is no whole with­out the pieces. I’ve been writ­ing in this form a lot, it frees up my brain in a way tra­di­tion­al lin­eation can­not and I find myself arriv­ing more suc­cinct­ly at truths when I reframe a poem into this form. It both slows it down and makes it more flu­id to me, like rests in a musi­cal score, an addi­tion to the cadence, a notable beat. Some peo­ple con­sid­er this a prose poem and I don’t know that I agree. It feels fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than a prose poem, and it isn’t usu­al lineation—perhaps then its own cat­e­go­ry? Either way, I enjoy tin­ker­ing with it. See­ing how it shapes my lan­guage. Unearthing it bit by bit. 

Jes­si­ca Nir­vana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet. She is the author of the poet­ry col­lec­tion Earth­ly Gods (Game Over Books, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Hon­ey Lit­er­ary, and else­where. Jes­si­ca was a 2022–23 Stadler Fel­low, she cur­rent­ly works as the Pub­lic­i­ty and Out­reach Man­ag­er for the Stadler Cen­ter for Poet­ry and Lit­er­ary Arts. She lives and writes in Lewis­burg, PA.