I’m doing great – that’s what I always tell
people, smoothing my face over all
the cracks, rehearsing calm until the
performance gets mistaken for truth.
My hands don’t shake, my voice stays even, but
that’s only the version I let myself tell.
Underneath it all, quietly, I miss you. I feel it
even now, though I keep bending the truth, keep leaning slant.
Explanation & Context
This poem takes its shape and its spine from Emily Dickinson’s most famous line about truth-telling. That’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Rather than simply echoing Dickinson’s idea, the poem borrows her actual words as scaffolding. Using the Golden Shovel form — a technique popularized by poet Terrance Hayes. In which each word of a source line becomes, in order, the final word of a new line. So Dickinson’s eight words (Tell, all, the, truth, but, tell, it, slant) become the eight end-words of this poem. Hidden in plain sight at the close of each line. orcing the new poem to build itself around — and in conversation with — the old one.
The content follows the prompt’s challenge directly: every line is a lie except one. The speaker performs the everyday lie of composure — “I’m doing great,” steady hands, a rehearsed calm — the small social fictions people tell to keep grief contained and presentable. Each of these lines is doing exactly what Dickinson describes: telling truth “slant,” softened and disguised so it doesn’t overwhelm. But the form itself insists on a break, a moment where the performance can’t hold. That break arrives in the seventh line, stripped of metaphor and armor: “I miss you. I feel it.” No dash, no evasion — just the bare admission the rest of the poem was built to avoid.
Pairing of Prompt and Form
What makes this pairing of prompt and form feel apt is that Dickinson’s own poem is about the necessity of indirection — the idea that truth delivered too suddenly can blind rather than illuminate. This poem enacts that theory formally: it surrounds its one true line with seven that deflect, so that when the truth finally surfaces, it lands with the force Dickinson describes — not because it’s shouted, but because everything around it has been so carefully, quietly false.
Leave a Reply