THE WAY IT FLOWERS (POEMS)

by C. LaSandra Cummings

MANY WHAT WE CANNOT SEE

I can’t touch the air

in my lungs, but know 

that it is there feel it 

stack how ice cream 

sits 

in a 

cone

“Sparse in its division of labor but not in its intensity and vision of abstraction, the crystallized poems from [Cummings's coming collection] are MC Escheresque, a space where the paradox of logic divides itself in halves, before folding into itself.” 

—VI KHI NAO

[PRE-FACE]

An act of improvisation, as a rule, solely sources its material from what’s readily available. Resources used in such an act seem, on their face, to be inadequate for the task. But the improviser makes due. Bringing her vision through, she seems to create “something out of nothing.” A popular African American adage: “Making a way out of no way.” Taking what seems, on its face, to be inadequate, turning it on its head—so to speak—and producing an outcome far greater than a simple summation of the material parts. It is this notion of “waymaking” that The Way It Flowers, my poetic work-in-progress, seeks to tend to. 

It’s not that the way doesn’t exist already. (Ex nihilo nihil fit.) It’s not that the way needs to be made, exactly. It’s more a matter of seeing; the matter seems to be one of sight. And this, a matter of composition (as Gertrude Stein points out—over the course of time, from generation to generation, the only thing that actually changes is what’s seen at any given time). Thus, here, we have the scene (seen) and we have its site (sight). 

We have memory, also. Personal, communal, ancestral memory. We have The Site of Memory. Toni Morrison, in her duly titled essay, says writing is “awe and reverence and mystery and magic” as she attends to her work of recovering, accentuating, Black interiority through a historical lens. Memories and images are among the archaeological remains of a historical site, she says, and by prioritizing the image—that is, using the image to draw out information (rather than using information to draw an image)—one can arrive at a place of truth (rather than at a statement of fact) concerning the historical event.

My project is interested in how and when the images of these various memory channels (personal, communal, ancestral) converge and collapse divisions of time and give rise to new compositions—new images, epistemes—possibilities. These various channels—passageways. These channels—bands of frequencies like stations on a radio. Which brings us back to improvisation, and to music. 

My poems are sonic containers, structured to uphold reverent revisions of abstraction (love, hope, faith). My poems are sonic containers, bestowing awe-filled form and favor to the enigmatic quotidian of our lives. The language of these poems are growing. The language of these poems expand through sonic-rich blooming language. They mean to invoke states of bewilderment—which Fanny Howe defines as “an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability,” produced by a circumambulation, caused by alliteration, repetition, and rhyme, where, resulting, “there is no fixed position.” Leaning heavily on the sonic through the aforementioned sound devices, plus assonance and consonance, my work chooses to rub against the notion of finality (i.e. a fixed position). These poems prefer instead to be “in-progress,” “in-process,” moving... It is this fluidity that leads us, poet and reader, out of the present doomsday. It is this fluidity that appears to “make a way out of no way.” The improviser—the poet—uses the language she has available—eurocentric and patriarchal, limited and destructive as common american english (sic) is—to point to something else in a somewhere else that’s actually here already.

Project Status: In Progress

Projected Completion: Spring/Summer 2027

References:

Howe, Fanny. "Bewilderment" in How2 Vol 1, No 1. (March 1999). https://archive.howeverhow2archive.org/archive/online_archive/v1_1_1999/fhbewild.html 

Morrison, Toni. "The Site of Memory" in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 83-102.

Stein, Gertrude. "Composition as Explanation" (1926).  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69481/composition-as-explanation

© C. LaSandra Cummings 2026