“Hear: here sings the starshine of dreams, for sure: the bends of them, the way their colors drip and bleed...”

Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multimedia poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Samiya is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories (2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

We know that much.
We are our own
shadow. We are want

of touch. We are woman
and man and man don’t look.
We are curvature—look!

We are train.
We are star.
We are big

tiny spiders. We are
crawling. We are biting.
We are hungry. We are

a stopped carousel. We are
bodies dropped to the floor.
We are shaking. We are our own.

Still, somehow, we are
laughter. We are the doorway out.
We are (again) the doorway in.

Artist Reflection

negro being :: freakish beauty
+
Field Theories #4

Finding starshine through the dark.
There is a fire. Again.

What Fred calls “music” calls “ours” like – wut?!
What a dream.

Hear: here sings the starshine of dreams, for sure:
the bends of them, the way their colors drip and bleed.

Now—as I refl ect on these refl ections presented here, how they were not just envisioned but seen. The thoughtfulness of their selection. The generous insistence of these editors to make a groundbreakingly beautiful document. Now I am returned to the specifi c and actual space—a cabin by the sea where I lived in COVID exile for nearly a year and a half, and haven’t been back since. There is a tiny house here where many things were fi lmed. Created. Made. Insisted upon despite the despair. Pieces like this: an attempt, through the fl oss, to continue being. Like, y’all remember when we had to shout at each other from a distance for fear of actual-ass death? The hours and hours and days and months alone? 2020/2021 was perhaps the longest winter of my life. And the gratitude that I was somehow held—safe (imagine!)—through the darkness—that I was allowed—aff orded—transformation. Well, it’s everything. The moment I returned to this bit of ground I grounded. To return, here, to this work— work which got me through—work which lived in conversation with so many beloveds—work which was called for and which answered—looked the daemons through the eye. And then the return: fi eld theories. So many years I lived its questions. Its demands still shake me: imagine! Its own insistence on remix—on reimagining and re-presenting itself (whole to part to fracture to fraction) through the gaze of and upon my own beloved community – well – imagine: to be not just carousel but doorway: kinda blows me away.