It Doesn’t Matter If I’m Understood

Jennifer Espinoza

You'll still try to destroy me in your own way Maybe with your hands Maybe with your silence Maybe with your tacit approval of this machine Here us women are crackling like sparklers above a lawn scraping diamonds from asphalt giving praise to the mountains before us Our love and our grace and our tenderness enough to change the shape of the universe You say (italicized)Goddess or you say (italicized) dead girl We live in the margins but don't get a taste of the joy of being there Not without loss Not without broken bones and bandaged flesh Our condition is nameless and we know this so we drift and deflate and let the wind have us but we don't stop living even when we sense our impending ghost even when we finger the dirt and think home Our life was always a thing of magic and magic is what lives outside of law One day we will be allowed to exist and you will never see us again   I don't want to be I don't want to be understood—I don't want to be understood— layers and layers of text on top of each other, rendering the lines illegible. these layers often repeat "I don't want to be understood," but the lines are not exclusively this.

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Headshot of Jennifer Espinoza

Jennifer Espinoza is a poet whose work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day @poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices) and I Don’t Want To Be Understood (Alice James Books). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently resides in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.

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I Don't Want To Be Understood
Alice James Books

New Gloucester, Maine

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“I Don’t Want to Be Understood is a blistering and a balm. Its speaker holds inside herself the garden, lush, the attending rot, seed and bloom, and the desire to be tended and tenderly so. Alongside the garden, Espinoza charts the cosmology of a woman come into herself in a world of violence, a world that would undo the wonder of this speaker. I leave this book deeply moved by Espinoza’s insistence on nurturing a green hope, a green heart.”
—Donika Kelly

"There are few writers as attuned to the potential of metaphor as Jennifer Espinoza, whose poems make this gesture something more like alchemy. From the first poem, where a trans woman stopped by the TSA blooms into a cloud of energy, Espinoza's poems enact a radical, surrealist, transmutation; her strange, dream-like recollections are spaces of un- and re-making, herself and the world. I Don't Want To Be Understood is simply a triumph—virtuosic, heartbreaking, and searing in its social critiques."
—torrin a. greathouse

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