I picked Our Numbered Days up off the library shelf thinking I vaguely remembered Hilborn’s name, and lo and behold, I was right: this kid made one of my favorite Button Poetry performance videos back in the day. I had no idea he’d put out a book, although it makes sense that he would. And in fact, this book contains the poem I was remembering seeing performed, “Liminality.”
I’m so glad to have found this book and re-remembered this poem, considering that I’m trying to put together a workshop on performing slam poetry for some high school students who are planning to compete in Louder Than A Bomb. I think I’ll use “Liminality,” since one of my students is a kid with a stutter(-like speech impairment) who is nervous about performing poetry on stage in front of people. That and probably, I don’t know, “Dinosaurs In the Hood” by Danez Smith, and something by Andrea Gibson. It's all coming together!
Other poems in this book that I thought were great: “Here and Away.”
“It’s so easy to think and keep thinking
until you are the last person left on earth.
Until the entire world is no larger than the space
between your bed and the light switch,
but I hear the world is ending soon.
When we go, and we’re all going to go,
I will be a part of it.”
“The Sadness Factory:”
“the lines
for samples are prohibitively long: New Apartment
Sadness; Everything Is Great but Something
Feels Off Sadness; A Midsummer
Night’s Sadness; The Sadness of Wanting
To Break Something but Being Too Weak;
The Sadness that Comes from Always Knowing
Exactly Where You Are.”
I also really love “OCD”, another Button Poetry viral video.
And here’s the entirety of “Moving Day,” because I think it encapsulates everything that I think is lovely and flawed and aching about this collection, in that way that poetry makes you understand what cannot be explained:
Today, as I was finishing the move
across town (and isn’t it funny
how cliché, the literal catharsis
of throwing out all the things
I no longer need: my Seasonal
Affective Disorder lamp, all the
egg cartons, you know, for the project,
all of my ex-girlfriend’s stuff
that survived the previous two purges:
curling iron, candles, painting
of her own face, swimsuit, bottle
opener, blender, all the now-dead
Christmas lights, all the food I can’t save,
the chair, the older chair, the sheets
in which the bad thing happened, the things
in the bottom of the box that I will
try to landfill but will, as always, keep: the toy
my mother sent me that is just a squishy heart
filled with larvae, the bicycle
part I cannot identify, the handwriting
I also cannot identify, the sheets in which
the bad thing happened, the sugar
bowl, the sugar, the textbooks, the
instructions and signs and limits) a sparrow
flew just over my feet, its wings beating
against its own body, a sound not unlike
applause, and it hit the ground, and because
it was dead it lay still.
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