WHAT YOU HEAR WHEN YOU OPEN THE DEATH TRAP OF MY MIND
SHADOW-SELF MEDICINE
I am not
sinful
Selah
my shadow self
is not
sinful
Selah
my shadow self
is not my
sin nature
Selah
I have no sin nature
Selah
my shadow self
is part of me
Selah
there is nothing
wrong with her
Selah
there is nothing
wrong with me
Selah
I claim us both
with open arms
Selah
and I
Selah
until
I believe it
Selah
Allison Wall
Allison Wall is a queer, neurodivergent writer living in the American Midwest. Her work explores experiences of deconstruction, self-discovery, and belonging. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. Her poetry has previously appeared in ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, and The Shallot. Allison is present if not active on social media as @awritingwall, and you can always find her on her website, allison-wall.com, where she occasionally blogs about things like the intersection of neurodivergence and surrealist art.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
The grief of religion, particularly religion that reinforced the ideology that "you are bad" when you make mistakes is so palpable in these poems I couldn't say no. I honestly got choked up reading "there is nothing/wrong with me" in "SHADOW-SELF MEDICINE".
Also I mean come on, "WHAT YOU HEAR WHEN YOU OPEN THE DEATH TRAP OF MY MIND" is just so wild and there's so much in there to deconstruct. I could spend hours looking at that. It's a powerful examination of the way being raised in a high-control faith impacts every aspect of your thought process.
I honestly think these poems speak for themselves, but the repetition in and variation of that repetition in each is really what sold me. This is TWO great ways to handle the burden of intrusion that religion can have on a person.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
I saw that Taylor was interested in religious trauma (CHECK), and particularly in poems that quote or misquote religious texts, like the Bible (CHECK). Taylor felt like the ideal reader for what I was doing, and I’m grateful Taylor felt the same way!
These two poems are very visually different on the page, how are they in conversation with each other?
TLDR: “WHAT YOU HEAR WHEN YOU OPEN THE DEATH TRAP OF MY MIND” is what “SHADOW-SELF MEDICINE” is trying to heal.
“DEATH TRAP” pops the lid off the Pandora’s box of religious trauma. The chaos and cacophony of the religious inner critic is fully on display. Toxic Biblical ideology to the max. Original sin plus the fear of eternal punishment creates this “DEATH TRAP” that, even years after leaving religion, is very hard to dismantle.
“SHADOW-SELF MEDICINE” also uses Biblical form and language, but it borrows the graceful shape of a Psalm, a comfort in repetition, the command to “Selah” or “repeat” or “meditate.” “SHADOW-SELF MEDICINE” is the antidote to the thought processes of “DEATH TRAP”—or at least, I hope it is.
I wonder what advice you may have for younger poets, or any poet interested in more experimental work, on how to approach a poem like "WHAT YOU HEAR WHEN YOU OPEN THE DEATH TRAP OF MY MIND"? How did you go about writing that?
Every poet’s work is different, so I don’t have concrete advice, apart from: find your material. What do you hold inside that you want to transmute through the alchemy of writing? What experiences are you compelled to understand, to share? And then, what form serves and adds to that communication?
In “DEATH TRAP,” my material was the voice of my internalized religious indoctrination: a nasty evangelical fundamental inner critic. I wanted to translate how I experience that inner critic into something an external reader could understand. So I transcribed everything I could hear them saying and ended up with four or five pages. I used Canva, put the phrases into individual text boxes, sorted them, combined similar ones, and played with page placement. That part was fun: putting together all of these puzzle pieces, discovering contradictions, juxtaposing those phrases, making further meaning.
I didn’t set out to write something experimental. The poem-as-collage form came naturally. I think it’s important to follow flow, to have the goal of working with my material vs. being experimental—so maybe that’s another piece of advice! Of course, like any writing advice, take it if it’s useful, leave it if it’s not…