In Their Own Words
Nora Claire Miller on “Rumor”
[I was born to be gigantic]
I was born to be gigantic,
said the violet flower that derailed me.
this is a rumor, so there aren’t
any rules to go with it. I built its shape of pegs,
won’t take that lying down, my name is zero,
my name is nonce, my name is nobody, who the hell are you.
yesterday I tried to buy a joke.
I brought it to my home,
took it inside slowly like how you
come out of a bath. there was nothing new
to say about it. to make the violet speak to you,
just go crazy, said my second-grade art teacher
handing me construction paper, glue.
just go crazy, I say now to the flower,
engulfed as I was by her lesson. her lesson to
say more plainly the visual field. to draw to
the lowermost quadrant of the paper.
to draw upon my limits like ribbons of gas,
to “make these limits assets”
(to write about them in essays).
to see the ending from both sides,
so profound was my derailment.
Reprinted from Groceries (Fonograf Editions, 2025) with the permission of the publisher and author. All rights reserved.
On "Rumor"
When I first wrote “Rumor” the document was titled “DEAR FLOWER I SAID staying remarkably still.” Here’s how the beginning went:
DEAR FLOWER I SAID staying remarkably still.
DEAR FLOWER I SAID TO THE FLOWER
yes? said the flower, rotating her head to face me
WHAT KIND OF FLOWER ARE YOU? I ASKED
I am as it would be difficult to be: a flower with a name
but no beginning. I did not come from a seed. I was born
to be gigantic.
Most of my poems have a name but no beginning. Or if a poem did have a beginning, it got snapped off early on in the process, and the new beginning feels more like the middle. I wrote this beginning and snapped it off by putting a bunch of hyphens underneath it in the document. Beneath the hyphens I wrote the poem that, some years later, I reluctantly titled “Rumor.”
I didn’t want to title it anything, but my friends made me do it. You can’t send out poems without titles, they explained. No magazine will want to publish them. All the other poems in the issue will have titles, and yours will look weird on its own. Or you’ll have to call it “untitled,” which feels cringe.
But none of the poems in my manuscript had titles. Groceries always felt like groceries in a bag, a collection of many small objects that had no clear hierarchy to them. No titles means no order. No one knowing which words on the page are in charge of which other words. Which ones you should take more seriously and which ones you should kind of ignore.
But I was sending the poem to live by itself, totally vulnerable and surrounded, most likely, by other poems it had never even met. A name, at least, would offer some protection.
And anyway, most titles feel like rumors people spread about their poems. In “Rumor,” I spread one of my own. Here’s how it goes: I say something with language. Then I ask the language, tell me what I’m supposed to say next. I can’t, the language says, I’m just a rumor. I only float above the substrate. I cannot be the actual event.
In that case, I said to the rumor, stop spreading. I no longer want you. I won’t stop, said the rumor. I am a rumor and you cannot control me. Then the rumor escaped like a silverfish between shower tiles. Always threatening to re-emerge when I least expect it.
A joke is when you point out the difference between an utterance and the space around the utterance. Everyone understanding the joke notices the space, and they stand inside it and laugh. Eventually you pick one joke and stick with it and it grows around you and becomes your whole life for a while. Then you package it up and it becomes a book. That’s what I like to tell myself, anyway. But a rumor is not the future. Nor the thing it stands near.
