Note from the curator:
"Someone I work with recently called me a liar, and I called them a liar back, and then nothing really happened, except the return of a childhood obsession with the 9th commandment. Exodus 20:16 of the King James Bible: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. (There is a lot about neighbors in the Bible.) "Do not lie" is a quicker adaptation of this clunky, energy-draining original, which is also not an original, but a translation of a translation, as much a mark of the translators and their lives and their paychecks as it is of the Judeo-Christian God who commanded it.
It would have been funnier if my coworker claimed I bore false witness. I would have admitted it if she had, even though it wasn't true, I really hadn't lied. The phrase would have stung less on the outset, until later, when I would be suddenly subsumed, wondering what I had or hadn't done, what witness I truly bore. There is more action involved in bearing something. A burden is insinuated, and a beast to carry it. "Do not lie" is solitary, focused on the liar. "Do not bear false witness" is communal. Do not make new beasts.
These four poems are acts of bearing witnessing. Not falsely, but liberally: on beaches, train cars, mountaintops, dogs. In each, the writer bears the burden of storytelling, observing until they become the observed. There are no beasts, however, to carry this witnessing: only questions. Who are we witnessing, the poems ask. Whose lives are we bearing? Whose are bearing ours back? These poems remind me that witnessing is the first step toward acting. Toward flinging oneself into the great, calling world." -- Bex Frankeberger
We Our Feet
Poem and reading by Ahana Ganguly
Video by France Rreally
Atlantic Ocean at Jacob Riis Beach
Sydney Haas
No Returns
Ife Olujobi
Springtime Mountain
Bex Frankeberger
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