Cripping Time, Creating Community

Crip time describes the varying alternative temporalities experienced by disabled people. Because lyric poetry operates on its own temporality, the lyric is a fruitful place to create expressions of non-normative temporalities, including crip time. This article reads two contemporary works of poetry, Molly McCully Brown’s The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (2017) and Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl (2022) for their expressions of crip time, 1 created through both formal choices like poem length, white space, line length, placement on the page, and book structure, as well as content decisions such as engagement with the nonhuman world and depictions of time travel. As these poems bend, syncopate, skip over, and pause normative time, they envision more expansive, more caring communities than those in which we currently live, suggesting that these communities can be imagined and, potentially, built, only under alternative temporalities such as crip time.