"Survivor Audition Video #3" by Isaiah Newman

VOICEMAIL POEMS

We open with a stationary shot of me in my office, a pride flag on the wall behind me. An offscreen bonfire flickers in my eyes, and the savvy viewer will read this as a symbol of both passion and hunger, and before they can ask where it comes from I begin to speak: “I’m a therapist and community organizer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is my audition video for Survivor in the form of a poem, and my name is Isaiah Moses Newman…” and the savvy viewer will recall, here, that Moses once came upon a field that held a bush that burned and would not die, and if they are Jewish they may also know that he answered the blaze by shouting hineni, which can translate to “here I am,” but also “witness me here, having survived all that has tried to kill me.” A drumbeat begins in the background as I describe the tear-stained and sleepless nights of my adolescence, and then on screen a picture flashes: me and the friends I called family at age 19, huddled in down jackets like penguins, and there is a conspicuous silhouette carved out of the center of the picture, but I do not name him, or describe the way his loss shattered us. Instead, the picture vanishes, and I explain that I have spent the past year obsessing over a reality TV show in which found families tear each other apart for false promises of survival, and it has felt familiar. I do not say that I lost someone the same way as the silhouette in October, because the law prevents me from speaking their name. I do not describe how badly I want to believe that we can save people, and how I have failed. Instead, I speak of the many ways I have tried to stop the world from burning even when it seems impossible, and then we pan to the fourth wall, which is not a wall at all but a curtain of air that opens onto a field containing a bonfire, and a long tracking shot follows me as I walk through it, and I stop next to the inferno and my ribs glow through my shirt like coals and we zoom out to see that the bonfire was actually the burning bush the whole time, limbs outstretched and skeletal, and I reach my arms up to the sky and my fingertips light like candlewicks, and the glow spreads from my ribs to my heart, and the savvy viewer will see how I burn and burn and do not die, and then I shout of how the world seems always to be inventing new ways to break the people and communities I love, but my heart burns with the flame of survival and I am a therapist to keep as many of us alive and singing as I can, and I am an organizer because we deserve a world that can hear our songs, and I will win Survivor if you put me on the show because I know what it takes to keep the torch of belief alive in the face of all that would drown it. So hineni, CBS. Here I am. Come and find me. ————————————– Isaiah Newman called us from Cambridge, MA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems