“X” deals with the deployment of the letter x in “latinx” and its other uses as a gesture of erasure, inclusion, voidance, negation, gender neutrality and as a placeholder for a language that is yet to come. These critiques & explorations of the letter x are interwoven with my migratory experience through language and spaces, focusing on themes of translation, and the mutability of language, as a tool to destabilize it, critique it, and launch propositions for new language.
The poem also explores moving through space and language in its form. Self-aware structurally witty at times, marginally squeezed into a new form while crossing the border, taking “meme” form, blocks of “justified” text with their rebukes, with hints of Concrete & Language poetry woven into an Epic form, fragmented the way a body moves through space, translating bits of experience & finding new ones in between, through the borderlands of languages. I write this poem for a younger self, a self that felt fragmented with a discombobulated sense of belonging. In writing it I assume a stance, an ambiguous one perhaps but nonetheless a new space from which to embody my multiplicities, to embody the imaginable.
