1/31: Delighted by Sara Lynne Puotinen

Author’s note: Each poem contains three poems. Poem 1 is the entire first grid, poem 2 is the inner circle (the central vision I still have), and poem 3 is the second grid (ring scotoma).*

*DELIGHTED

Poem 1:

I find it one day. Standing in front of a white wall staring straight ahead a thick dark circle with a small light center appears. My blind spot. But not yet a spot. Now only a ring of smudged gray surrounding white. Smudged gray the central vision I’ve lost and white what remains. Every year this ring will thicken spread until absorbing the shrinking center. I stare at it until my head aches my eyes twitch. I observe how it moves slightly when I shift my gaze. How it grows bigger when I cover my left eye smaller when I cover my right. How it begins to throb then fade then flare. A dark fiery hoop with silvery flecks burning through my thinning retina.

Poem 2:

remains.
ring will thicken
orbing the shrink
stare at it

Poem 3:

To witness this site of my unseeing usually hidden behind softened forms filled-in gaps astonishes. What magic lets me see through this ring obscuring my view? How satisfying now to know this show is more real than the illusions my brain offers as sight.

From the author: Four years ago, I was diagnosed with cone dystrophy and told that all of my central vision would be gone in five years. I began to document the process of this vision loss. My Mood Ring poems are part of that documentation. The form of these poems comes from the ring scotoma (blind spot) in my central vision, which I found by staring at a wall and then tracing what I saw on a blank piece of paper, and an Amsler grid. Each poem is actually 3. Poem 1 is the entire first grid and represents my overall working vision, poem 2 is the inner circle (the central vision I still have), and poem 3 is the second grid (my ring scotoma).

Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in south Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, where she reads and writes and tries to be upright and outside as much as possible. She earned a B.A. in religion, an M.A. in ethics, and a Ph.D in women’s studies, which all inform her experiments in paying attention and her playful troubling of what it means to write while moving, to move while writing, and to do both while losing her central vision from a degenerative eye disease (cone dystrophy). Her writing has appeared in Poemeleon, Hearth & Coffin, Longleaf Review, and The Account, among others.

Original published: JMWW