Dionne Custer Edwards

How Many Points of Breaking

The water smells like metal. If you boil
all its insides before you drink, it smells like trying.
Something like sugar sprinkled over rotten.
We inhabit. Take up too much space.
Make indentations, odd bursts of storm.
Burnout garnered an official medical diagnosis.
The body depleted, a long slow weep, an empty glass.
Everything you touch changes. A petal bending
under the weight of droplets, an accumulation,
a threshold, the composition of the planet
with small decisions. No more tasks, the difference
between burnout, anxiety, depression. Purging,
a lifelong endeavor when you exist in a hard space,
a heavy thing inside of questions, deep discounts
on mending. Some peace to hold in your hands.

Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer, educator, and the Director of Learning & Public Practice at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She also founded the award-winning art and writing program Pages. Dionne has published critical and literary writing, internationally and nationally in Sanat Dünyamiz (“Our Art World”), Turkey; Journal GEARTE, Brazil; and in the University of Arizona’s Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her literary work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Barren Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Flock, Gordon Square Review, Grist, Porter House Review, Storm Cellar, The Seventh Wave, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. Dionne is co-editor of a book series, forthcoming, to be published by Ohio State University Press, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities.