Jamie Gannon

note to Cyd

Trauma
is
explaining rain
when you’ve only
seen sun

There is
no language

I am against silence
but that doesn’t mean
I can speak

Jamie Gannon is a professor of writing and journalism with over twenty years teaching experience. She once came upon a beautiful, life-changing anthology, Against Forgetting. The anthology’s premise was simple: how to use poetry to confront personal, physical, and political trauma. Poems as civil disobedience; poetry as defiance. The following poem was born from that central tenet. Her poems would fit comfortably in the confessional vein of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Jamie is currently finishing her dissertation and dreaming of the Italian countryside.