Ashna Ali on “Now You See Me, Or, Denial”

My debut collection, The Relativity of Living Well, traces a journey that began with my contracting long COVID-19 in March 2020. This was before we were told the virus was airborne, before masks, and before vaccines. We timed washing our hands by singing Happy Birthday. If ill, city services told us to remain home and limit human interaction, and offered no further medical support. During the two weeks in which the early poems of the collection take place, many Brooklyn residents passed away in their homes. “Now You See Me, Or, Denial” belongs to the suite of poems that open the book, and which are titled and shaped after the stages of bereavement. The titles for these poems arrived two years later, after I realized that I was writing both in and for the present and toward a future in which everything had inevitably changed.

The earliest draft of “Now You See Me, Or, Denial” was written as part of Shira Erlichman’s online poetry and creativity program, In Surreal Life. I was nominated by poet heidi andrea restrepo rhodes to be a Surreal Scholar, or a BIPOC poet who would benefit from a waived fee and would make great use of the program, and I was accepted in April 2020. I was beginning to recover enough to go back to teaching and engaging with the world, but moved in a world of pain and was not yet ready to admit what was happening to me. Between desperately needing an outlet to understand my own experience and show up as best as possible for my students, and having the extraordinary community and resources that In Surreal Life ushered into my life, that was the month, however painful, that made a poet of me.

The speaker in “Now You See Me, Or, Denial” attempts to convince themself that they do not have COVID-19. They make a variety of excuses and take inventory of their symptoms in hopes of deeming them ordinary. It opens, “Look, I was always a sickly child.” Sickly children are often sickly adults with tendencies toward hypochondria, but sickly adults also spend a lot of time gaslighting themselves about their symptoms. Many of us spend our days toggling between the two stances, a drama that unfolds explicitly across these lines: “My bloodmetal mouth parts to ask if sweat / was always so cold. / Are sour calves, like chocolate, / just another winter thing?” They debate with themself whether their usual ailments and aches in the winter look or feel like this moment does, their affect fluctuating across each push and pull. That the speaker decides their desperation for temperature and texture is “Not new” in the absence of perceiving “aroma or flavor” suggests that these are certainly not only new, but extremely alarming responses. The telltale signs of COVID in its earliest mutations were temporary (or not so temporary) losses of taste and smell. This poem helps me remember how long I tasted nothing but blood, though there was no blood to taste, and the beginnings of nerve pain spreading through my legs, which remains a chronic symptom of dysautonomia. The poem has gone through many drafts, but enough of the original lines remain so that I am, perhaps darkly, deeply entertained by my own ignorance of its prescience and many ironies.

The poem is set in front of a Zoom screen—the collection’s first of many, in the early days of online teaching. While the speaker can control the image their students can see, their neighbor who observes them through a window—a different kind of screen and barrier—is privy to their dramatic, full-body coughing. The camera's limited frame allows the speaker to center student experiences and anxieties over their own by pretending for the kids and for themselves that they are not ill: “Look, if I mute myself, my wheezing / is muffled even to me!” Even in 2020, the line between what we want the world to perceive of us and how we perceive our reality began to blur. However, the neighbor’s implied concern when she watches the speaker hack in the window puts a dent in the idea that the speaker is “fine” and “bow[s] my head / to where the screen / cannot see me.” Rather than get out of the neighbor’s line of sight, they escape their students’ gaze as a foreshadowing of the slow and inevitable dissociation and struggle with corporeal identity that unfolds as life moves increasingly online.

The poems in The Relativity of Living Well live a life outside of their first iterations, but their original contexts of production feel important. The first handful were written as part of In Surreal Life, printed on a laser printer at home, and sewn into paper chapbooks for sale as a fundraiser item for the mutual aid organization Bed-Stuy Strong. I was too ill and overworked to make food deliveries or phone bank, so I chose to make something out of these poems that might benefit the community. Now, they stand as witness and a record of a time when we are being guided by government forces and media suppression, a time they now deem not only over but somehow unimportant.

We have yet to collectively honor and memorialize the many lives we lost to COVID-19 in the United States. My hope for the collection is that it marks to fellow chronically ill and disabled people that they are not alone, that they are seen, heard, and cared about. As for those who are not (yet) disabled, I hope it serves as a call to rage and action. We all deserve a world in which it is safe to become ill, to age, and not live in slavish dedication to labor under capitalism. Poetry can help us imagine and refine our ideas of how to live interdependently, committed to one another’s care, and to justice. I am grateful to this book for teaching me that and refining my practices to align with disability justice as decolonial praxis and the inspiration for a more humane, interpersonal grace than I ever thought available to me before poetry.