Origin Stories - Anastasia Walker

Before You Fall

    Before You Fall
    by Anastasia Walker


                                                                imagine: 2k
    skyward, 30 molten stories
                                                               sirens smoke & uniform

    frenzy below, but in your
				                                crow’s nest buffeted by

    the cleansing blue
                                             the skyline

    so clear so
					                                 choose to fly

		          beautiful, you
						                                                 before you fall

Origin Stories – Before You Fall

Like most lyric poems, this piece had its genesis in metaphor—the fusing of an emotion or cluster of emotions with an image, a memory, an event, or some combination of these—and the words that came were my attempt to give sound and shape to that fused compound’s internal dynamic. Memories of living in NYC at the start of the new millennium teaching and in love and running from my long repressed gender identity found an echo in remembered stories of people leaping to their deaths from the Twin Towers in the lovely late summer morning of 9/11 before the buildings collapsed à In the conflicting lateral and downward movements on the page, their desperate choice and my giddy, stupid hope for a final reprieve from myself in a passion powerful enough to lift me above the gravitational pull of my own inner necessity.

“Before and After” appears in my book, The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is (bd-studios, 2022).

Bio

Maine native Anastasia Walker is a queer poet, essayist, and scholar living in Pittsburgh. Her poems have appeared in Gyroscope and several other journals, and her first book of poetry, The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is, was published in 2022. Her essays have been published in Shenandoah, Fourth Genre, and The Rambling. She has also blogged on politics, social media, and trans/LGBTQ+ issues for both Huffington Post and Medium. She’s a proud member of her community’s PFLAG chapter and Indivisible group, a passionate amateur photographer and musicologist, and a lover of long walks and (when she visits home in the summers) swimming in the ocean.

Blog: https://anastasiaswalker.blogspot.com/

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Social media:

Instagram: staswalker22

Twitter: @staswalker22 [I have a more sporadic presence there]