my poetry starts with a tied tongue, cut and bloody, and the desire to heal. i carry a secret, a scar i am intent on keeping concealed. the shame of it nearly suffocated me and stopped my heart. with water filling my throat i keep my words hidden. i keep my secret safe. i cannot name it, but it persists in my mind. on worse days it is a violence, on better ones as art it pounds language lyrical and starts to sound like a song.
i write my truths abstracted, veiled as poem, and pour them out to make the story i show. from the secret to the artful façade, i let them shift in form until they affix to the page as a mark that fails to fade. even when rendered in partial illegibility, my words remain resilient on display.
my work is the recovery, pouring the words as the water that drowned me into a vase and watch new blooms occupy it. i scrub black ink off the press rollers to coat it in smoky orange and red. i rearrange the words and run again. i step out of the shame. i carry my secrets and i seek my forgiveness, seek absolution to perform pride at what i hold. my work is to be still learning, still outlasting, now flourishing. my work is the search for what follows after.
Bio:
tjr lake is a poet and printmaker. creating from a place of queerness and neurodiversity, their work seeks a way to recover time, to recover memory, and to hold hope in the face of apocalyptic despair. they completed their mfa in poetry from mills college, are the two-time winner of the mary merritt henry prize for a group of poems and the winner of the san francisco foundation/nomadic press literary award for poetry, and have previously shown work at river arts as part of their “see me” exhibition. they are currently based in madison, wisconsin.
- Collections: Fragility and Fortitude