How I Bend Into More: A Long Poem

Abstract

Centered in my disabled experience, my long poem, How I Bend Into More, explores the intersections of the disabled body and poetic form. Formal choices in my poem are tied to my disabled experience. White space, shape, photopoetry (composed from scanner photographs of paper-quilled anatomy), and image-text all work to pull my existence from the margins to the center. My poem performs the physical image of my body as I undergo a journey of repair from ableism and self-inflicted pain. How I Bend Into More is a long-poem articulation of a restoration of the self and the body writing itself into selfhood.