Unveiling the Inner Artist: InterArts Cabinet of Curiosity

Something Out of Nothing Poem (TW homophobia, homophobic slurs)

By Marley Orange

Something out of nothing

Please highlight the text below to read the poem.

You saw a blank slate of wood
A canvas for your own art
And out of that nothing you created something

My door is not your canvas.

You wielded your paintbrush
In the shape of a pocket knife

And there you chiseled:
FAG.

FAG?
Am I to be devalued to such a word
For who my heart is drawn to?

I could see it in blinking lights
Ten feet long and luminous
Irradiating the dim hallway on the second floor of Jackson.

FAG.

My first month on campus and
You placed a target on my back

It’s none of your business.
You made it everyone’s business.

You keep your own face, own identity
You show to the world what you wish for it to see

You hold deep within you
Secrets
To remain secrets

You have robbed me of that luxury,
Where my privacy once was is
A lonely carving of an
Ugly word

I would like to share everything
I would like to share nothing

You do not deserve to be in my art or in my mind
You are nothing.

I’ve created something out of your malicious acts
I’ve created something out of you. 

 

Reflection

For this poem, I thought about creating something out of nothing, and began by writing about creating something out of the nothing that is a blank page of paper. This is something I do all the time as a writer. Then I began to write a stream of consciousness, talking about what I wished to fill the paper with. I wrote the stanza: “Shall I speak to my affinity for women / To get an A? / Exploit hate crimes I’ve endured / For pity points?” When I wrote this, I realized there was a lot of unresolved emotion behind it that I have yet to tackle with my writing. I decided to do this subject matter, but to not do it for “pity points,” I was doing it to tell my story of what happened to me. On October 25, 2020, I had realized that someone had carved “FAG” into my dorm room door on campus. (Jackson 204). It was actually a friend who pointed it out to me at first, and then it became all I could see on my door. I was so embarrassed and mortified. I told my RA about what happened, and he helped me fill out a work order. The people wrote back to me and told me that the doors would be replaced the next year, and to put a sign over it for now. I had to push really hard to finally get them to send someone to just sand down the area of my door that said the ugly word. Here is an image of the door before it was sanded down.

I had the idea to put my entire poem in white text, so it originally looked like nothing, and then the reader has to literally create something out of nothing by highlighting the text and discovering the poem. I also did this because of the desired privacy that I speak about in my poem. Only the people that look for my story may find it. Whenever I write poetry, I write about 15-20 stanzas, half of it being entire nonsense. I then try to make sense of my own gibberish, and order the lines into a coherent poem. Once I did this, I asked for the help of my fellow InterArts student, Chris Chiasera. He was able to help me a lot by reminding me to show and not tell, something I sometimes forget to think about. One of the lines in my poem was originally: “You maintain your privacy and anonymity and I the opposite.” Chris reminded me that this was pretty openly stating exactly what was happening, instead of more subtly showing the reader the way I feel. With Chris’s help, I changed this into several stanzas: “You keep your own face, own identity / You show to the world what you wish for it to see / You hold deep within you / Secrets / To remain secrets // You have robbed me of that luxury,  / Where my privacy once was is / A lonely carving of an / Ugly word”. I found this to be much more effective. 

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