My name is Poder Gotuma and I started writing poetry when I was 11 and I wrote it the whole way throughout my teenage years.

And then I got really involved in religion when I was 18 and I didn't write poems for a few years.

And it was like they were building in me like some kind of explosion.

And a few years later, I had a diary that had no lines in it,

and I filled the whole thing up in six months with poem after poem. And there was one that I really

couldn't quite say where it came from. It started off with, it appeals very much to the passionate

in me. I've lost that poem now. I don't know where it is, but I knew even as I wrote it,

that this was a poem about poetry in me, a poem about being pursued by poetry, about wanting

it, about resenting it, about resisting it, and about how, even if I found it difficult to

write, I had to write it because otherwise it would just

build and build and building, building me.

Ours Poetica by Carmen Jimenez.

I'm ill.

I'm federal. I'm on leave.

I'm a child of refuge.

I'm holy.

I'm a shit.

I'm desperate.

I won't tell you anything.

I'm first gen.

I'm Gen X.

I'm tied up.

...