by hand

In my first pregnancy, I had to have my wedding rings cut off.  This time, I pulled them off in the first trimester, put them in a box, closed them in a drawer.  I miss fidgeting them, miss looking down to see the squareness of the diamond, be reminded of that hot day in New York City when he asked me, going to the Strand afterwards with our ear ridges bubbling from sunburn.

I was so distressed at the cutting, I got sick.  And then I wrote a poem about it, learned about the median nerve, about connecting the heart to the hand by a thread.

I had carpal tunnel in both wrists through most of my first pregnancy, possibly exacerbated by exuberant knitting, or note-taking in graduate school.  This time, my hands have quieted until recently, when nesting has led to making, and an internal poetry-push has led to a nighttime routine:  Maya is asleep with her father in bed, and I try to:  watch a recorded documentary, usually something scientific, or maybe about the life of someone compelling or historically interesting; read one book of poetry and take notes on the lines I love the most, maybe add notes about writing ideas; write a poem, if I can.  It doesn't always happen.  Some nights, I fall asleep before I can creep back downstairs.  Some nights, I just want to read prose.  Some nights, I am too frustrated to do anything useful.  My hands tingle and have grown like breakfast sausage links.  I wake up in the morning, and the middle finger of my right hand has gone completely numb, the surrounding fingers tingle-following.  Maya zips and unzips the velcro on my braces, and sometimes, when I take them off to let my skin breathe, she'll slip them onto her hands.  Mama, I wear braces! Owie, han, han!

My daughter obsesses over her fingers.  A few months ago, she smashed two dog bones together, which would have struck slivers of bone, how hard was the crashing, but instead, it put two divots in her pointer finger.  It was the most blood I'd seen from her, those gashes, and she accepted the med-cin and ban-ay with bravery.  But she'd pull it all off and pick away, the healing process taking so much longer than it needed to.  She examines her hands still, finger by finger, pointing out to the irregularities, the hang-nails and such.  She's amazingly dextrous, always has been, and I'm looking to summer, wondering how she'll be in the garden, if she'll be gentle with the beetles and worms she's so fascinated by.

My hands aren't terribly pretty.  I don't maintain my nails; I let them grow haphazardly.  My cuticles get torn.  Even on my wedding day, I didn't have a manicure.  I forgot to even consider clear nail polish.  My friend Kelly has had a pedicure before the births of each of her sons.  Perhaps when my first full-length gets accepted, I'll have my hands scrubbed.  They're messy hands, that is certain.

But these are the hands that fold seedlings into the earth, that have guided breast to babe, that have folded bread dough, that guide fabric through needle's pounding stitches, have toughened beneath the strings of a violin, have painted sparkling sealant on the ornaments my daughter made for the holidays.  They've held onto a two-year-old wiggling toddler, and tonight, they carried said toddler and diabetic cat, in one strong arm, the other hand free for doors, into the veterinary clinic, where my hands learned the steps for applying insulin needles to the triangle between wedges of cat's shoulder blades.  They've turned pages, have gotten paper cut while shelving books for six years, part time, at a bookstore.  They've been permitted to massage lotion into my daughter's skin as winter dries it out, have applied medicinal cream to her, to my husband, to myself.  They've lingered in the feather-light blonde hair my daughter is finally growing, have held scissors to cut my husband's hair as we stood on the summer porch in our brief Winona apartment.  They've touched skin, given pleasure, have remained faithful, have touched lips before first kiss.  They've worried.  They've brought cigarettes to my lips, then trembled when I quit.  Trembled when I waited to defend my thesis, trembled while I waited to say I do, trembled while I brought myself out of panic attacks and faced anxiety disorders. 

We know our hands so well, our mother's hands.  Her hands have made their way into my poems:  I've recognized the veins, the long-slenderness, the way they click through knitting patterns with ease, the tough push of needle without thimble, the certainty of margin-marking while grading.

I read so much about how technology is changing our relationship to the world, and it's true.  I will admit to reading a tablet while rocking Maya to sleep at night.  I'm reading War and Peace right now, and its paper twin sits heavy on a bookshelf.  I can heft that glowing reader while shifting her from one numb arm to another without worry of thonking her on the head.  But I stick to paper, mostly.  My house is a firetrap.

And emails.  And letters.  Until I had Maya, I wrote daily letters to my widowed grandmother and my best friend.  Now, I write when I can, which isn't often enough. 

I read this article today:  4 benefits of writing by hand.  It's just a little thing, a blip on our reading day, but I thought so vehemently about how pleased I am at the callouses I developed at a very young age.  As I've brought out from the archives, Anne Frank was an awfully formidable influence on my writing-self.  I kept a diary; I named her Kitty.  This was a gift my mother gave me.  And once I started, my peculiar way of holding a pencil developed that bubble on my ring finger and my thumb, a smoother, more subtle bump.  They haven't faded.  I have a way of touching them with my forefinger, just as I'd worry those wedding rings, to remind me of something:  that I write.  And these are the two symbolic representations of what's most critical in my life:  my family and interaction with words.  When the world tightens, it's all I need (though, a little travel, even if it's a simple walk in the local woods, is awfully important too).

And this sausage-body, by the way, is due to expel a human being in exactly one month.  I hope the tadpole wants to come early, as much as I want him to, because my organs are wedged under my chin these days, but I need to remember too, to relish these kicks.  He might be the last one.  I don't think I could survive a third pregnancy, I'm so very bad at it.  It's strange what the body can tolerate though, what the body can go through.  And I think a little about the other night, how I could feel his individual fingers running along the right side of my uterus as I lay on my side, how it tickled, how very surreal that was. 

from the archives: "It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. -- Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)"

(originally posted on independent study on 09/28/09)

A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.
~V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives

While I was at Bread Loaf, I met this girl, whose name I can no longer recall, who had the most beautiful tattoo--a pair of poems twined together on her arm. I marveled at the tattoo from a distance, and snuck this shot during the Robert Frost talk at his cabin in the woods. I already knew of Shawn through Meryl, one of my fellow poets in the program, and we'd been emailing, discussing a tattoo Kelly and I have been considering for much too long. It takes a while for two people to settle into something permanent such as this, though I think the friendship took a bit less time. But when I saw the above tattoo, my lack of patience went into hyperdrive, and I began a dialogue with Shawn on how to do something like this on my own arm. First: settling on the poem. It had to be something I loved, and though some, who I've told I'm getting a poem tattoo, have asked if it would be one of my own, I cringed--it seems narcissistic, and somehow, I don't believe my own words are at a place that could claim that kind of permanence. Not on my own body, especially.

Sharon Olds has always been my favorite poet. Since I was a junior in high school. And this poem speaks to me on so many levels, and that last line, oh, that last line:

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

It felt so right. Which led to contemplation: what shape would this poem take? The above tattoo seems to be based on a flower, and I'd been hoping the poem I'd select would lend itself to something obvious--but no pillars, no paper dolls. Instead, Shawn suggested two of something, for the two figures in the poem, and if I weren't already talking birds with my friend Kelly, he'd suggest that one, which led me to wings--the poem in the end seems to be about a kind of freedom, a revenge to bad memories. Also, I read this from an interview with Sharon Olds:

What did you mean when you once said that your poetry comes out of your lungs?
[Laughs] Well, you know, it's curious where different people think their mind is. I guess a lot of people believe that their mind is in their brain, in their head. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body -- the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done. But poetry is so physical, the music of it and the movement of thought. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in. I find a tendency in myself not to breathe very much. And certainly I have noticed, over the years, when dancing or when running, that ideas will come to my mind with the oxygen. Suddenly you're remembering something that you haven't thought of for years.

Wings, lungs. The senses, which are so important to both her work and my own.

So he sketched this for me:


Shawn has a special knack, I must add, for what he calls "illustrative realism." He creates these amazing creatures with such imagination.

Here are some of my favorites he has put up on his blog: book birdhouse and the opposite arm's bird as well as these shoulder doilies. Some other clever designs: the bird/swine flu, this crazed penguin, this brainwashed sheep, airline safety, the drag king and queen, and many others.

He added the words, and from a distance (hence, my keeping it thumbnail size), you can see the wings still:


But I also wanted to include the larger draft, so you could see the way all the words interact. My favorite about the top tattoo is the way the words interact, overlap, mingle.

Thank you, Shawn: for doing this in trade, for being so patient with me as I "line edited" the wings, for doing this on your day off, for being so encouraging, for having an awesome wife who was my own cheering section and reminds me how cool poetry is, for being so good at PhotoShop, for making art for all the world to see. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

PS: All images, save the photographs, are copyright Shawn Hebrank. You can read Shawn's post about the not-to-be-repeated tattoo.

And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.
~Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

------

Here are two photographs of the tattoo that were taken since getting it--the first is the following Christmas, and the second is from January of 2011 when I gave birth to my daughter (it's one of my favorites, and I have it framed in my living room):

 I've since found out the name of the woman whose tattoo so inspired me to get my own.  A picture of her tattoo is beside mine in the book The World Made Flesh, and I've also since learned more about the unspoken copyright of tattoos, and I hope this woman forgives my not-so-secret theft.  For people who have them, tattoos are often so uniquely personal, as I've attempted to illustrate in this post, as is poetry.  The woman was actually at BreadLoaf for nonfiction, which also speaks to how significant those two poems are to her.  So, years later, I thank her, in hopes that she would have given permission, and in hopes that she appreciates this tattoo that is in homage to so many good things.

on beauty, coda to the coda

I've gotten some kind emails and words about yesterday's post, and I wanted to write an addendum to some things that have come up:

1/  I may feel shame in connection with my body, but I also love my body.  It has, after all, give me two beautiful things:  my daughter and has been a subject in my poetry and while the poems I won't say the poems are beautiful, I will say writing them has been beautiful.

2/  I grew up in a house where my mother would disparage her own body.  She was critical of herself and desperate to lose weight.  She had PCOS too.  She also grew up being called Crisco Fat in a Can by her father. 

I hope to snuff out my own vocalizations about dissatisfaction over my own shape because I don't want Maya, who may have PCOS too, begin to feel that niggling ache.  (But who am I kidding?  This culture with its advertisements and glossies aren't going to change any time soon.  Not the way I hope it will.)  I tell Maya she is beautiful at all kinds of moments--when she is wailing, when she is proud of something she's done, when she's falling asleep.  I tell her she's clever and smart and silly, and I know some parenting books will frown on that kind of labeling, but she's so much, and I'm not going to refrain from telling her.  I will tell her that I'm proud of her, because I am, and I'll hope and hope that she can continue to see the beauty in everything too.

And, of course, my post failed to mention a lot of what's critical to the conversation on the original postings, elements I find important too, which greatly reflects gatekeepers and how beauty (and race and gender) factor into that gatekeeping.  There's the male gaze and whitewashing and so much else.  Beauty creates a riot inside of me and breaks my heart--in all the best and worst ways.

on beauty

:: Prelude

Eduardo Corral had an interview at Ploughshares.  Jameson Fitzpatrick cited part of that interview in his discussion of Anne Sexton and Wilde Boys Salon creator Alex Dimitrov.  There were some reactions.  Including one by Dimitrov.  And Fitzpatrick. And Lucas, who just graduated from the same MFA program as I did.  And Kara, who was a scholar in the BreadLoaf workshop I was in with Ellen Bryant Voigt. 

I admit, in terms of the internet, this conversation seems to have closed, but for me, it lingers.  The body is beautiful and terrible, and it is wholly present in my own work.  

:: Intermezzo

The woman's voice in this fracas is what interests me the most, and Candito concludes:

In all seriousness, I like myself. I like being a poet who is a woman. I like other poets who are women and men. Oftentimes, I think poems are beautiful when they terrify or disturb me. I think poets should, if possible, try to foster supportive, inclusive communities based on their love of poetry. It’s complicated.

Yes.

:: Solo

I have something called poly-cystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).  It has resulted in my turning to infertility treatments; my first string of them landed me Maya.  I was diagnosed with PCOS before I was even interested in having children; in fact, it happened around the time I got married, when I was constantly wicking away my clothes to try on a wedding dress my mother made me.  I never went wedding dress shopping.  I cite this in conversations as if I missed out on something, but the truth is, I did bridesmaid dress shopping a few months before I was to get married, and I was horrified at what I saw in the mirror. 

Poly-cystic ovary syndrome wreaks havoc on your body's ability to process insulin and knocks your hormones off-kilter.  The inability to ovulate led to sparsely spaced menstruation, which was why I saw the doctor in the first place.  She asked questions that startled me:  noted the slow and steady weight gain over the years, asked about acne and sprouts of hair.  In a cruel twist, it turns out weight loss helps your body return to fertility, but with PCOS, the body is confused and stores fats like a desperate squirrel.

I say all of this because my body knows too, and it has severely and radically changed in the last decades.  I say this because there was a time (before Maya, before I triumphed over my body and had a baby) when I'd measure my friends by whether or not they knew me "before my fat days" or not.  I'd measure myself against the others in a room--am I the plumpest of my peers?  Like most with PCOS, I carry much of my excess around my middle, shaping me quite like a barrel.  I didn't want to have a head shot taken when my chapbook was accepted because I was eight months pregnant and heftier than I'd been in my entire life.  It was enough that my driver's license photo was taken then and I shudder every time I have to pull it out.  I felt a deep thread of humiliation.

Now, I nurse in public.  I still long for my pre-PCOS weight, but I will admit, I'm not willing to sign up for a half-marathon as my dear friend Emily did (and ran last weekend).  I'd rather sit in my backyard, reading poems that zing within.  (Like Eduardo's.  Or Kara's.)  Or work on writing my own.  Or pull weeds with my daughter. 

The body will always be a constant in my work.

I remember coming upon the word obese in one of Eduardo's poems, and I felt that flush of shame.  How can he write about that?  How can he call attention to his midline in such a public way?  At first, I couldn't decide if I admired his admission or felt embarrassed by it. 

And then I gave myself permission to write a poem about weight.  It's a little chip of a poem right now, but it's there, and it's something that breaks my heart, and maybe that's one of the most important things:  to write poems that move us.  Scare us.

:: Intermezzo

I've never considered the face of a poet when deciding whether or not to fall in love with his or her work.  I try to not look at the name of the submitter when I read for Midway Journal--so I am not swayed by recognition, but also by any other factors, such as gender or heritage (if, in fact, those things are even reflected in a name, and we all know how complicated that can be).   I think of my favorites as beautiful:  Sharon Olds, Claudia Emerson, Anne Carson, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Kimiko Hahn, Cynthia Zarin, Maxine Kumin, Sophie Cabot Black, Donald Hall, Rachel Zucker, Linda Gregerson, Jim Moore, Mariane Boruch, Adrienne Rich, Joyce Sutphen, and on.  Some of these, I know what they look like.  Some, I don't.  But I still peg the word beautiful to them, as inadequate and small as it feels when I think of how much I swoon when I think these names.

:: Coda

I have read Quan Barry's first two books recently (both gorgeous) in order to prepare for a review I'm writing for Cerise Press.  Out of curiosity, I did a Google search for Barry, partly because there are assumptions one can make about her by her name, but also assumptions that become skewed by mentions of the African-American experience within the poems.  The only image I found was this snapshot.   Even her faculty image is her book cover, as opposed to a head shot.  As someone who loves the poet's memoir or biography, as someone who can sometimes be voyeuristic when I enter fan-dom of another poet, I felt mild disappointment.  As a woman, as a person who is concerned about how much freight we put on looks as accessories to success, as someone who respects the desire not to be boxed in by ethnicity, and as someone who respects the poet's right to choice within how much of one's self is revealed in connection to one's work, I was glad.  Though I can't suppress personal curiosity--

I don't need to know what a poet looks like to know how much those words pulse.

the famine

I am haunted these days, by what I read and see, by what is going on in the Horn of Africa.  So much so that it seeps into my everyday, that so many moments are seen with the hum of these images.  The one that has sent a crack down the whole of me comes at minute 2:55-3:03 in the above video.  

I think it's because he's six months old--nearly the same age as Maya.  They could have been born in the same month.  They could have switched places; we have nothing to do with the circumstances we are born into.  

It could be us, one day, if our own country beat against itself, bullied itself into a civil war and families had to flee from fertile land to safety.  Safety from man-made destruction, that is--the fleeing leads to environmental instability.  It could be us, our land could dry up from five years without rain.  Parts of our own country are already suffering from this blue-sky persistence, this wet-earth lack.

Perhaps my ache is because I recognize the movement of that jaw.  That rhythmic up-and-down, that pump of tongue, that's something I know as I've known my own breathing these past few seasons.  So much of me cries out when I see that little boy drinking and I want to know if his mother is right, if he is gone now too, like too many other children in that region.

I think of how people say:  People are starving in Africa.  Because they want to cajole their children to finish their vegetables.  I think of how I'll never say that again.





And there's this video too, paired with an article I read in the newspaper:  "We met women and children who walked for weeks, often barefoot and with nothing but the clothes on their backs, desperate to find food and medical care.  We heard the story of one mother who was too weak to carry both of her children, and made the wrenching choice to leave behind one behind in hopes of saving the other.  We learned of families who had arrived too late whose children became part of a devastating statistic:  In the past three months alone, 29,000 children younger than 5 have died of starvation."


The scope of this has put me in a place I cannot think my way out of.  


I have this odd frustration--my milk is bountiful, but I cannot donate it locally (medication).  I wish I could soar over the ocean, feed my daughter, then feed others. 


I can nourish my daughter.  Beyond that familiarity of an infant consuming is the luck of capacity.  I read this blog post on Oxfam, and I think of the deep pleasure I have gotten from being able to feed Maya.  My body has proved itself less-than-ideal, has given qualms in the journey to motherhood and continues to edge me out, but the one thing I have found my body can do is keep Maya healthy.  This gift, this right has been taken away from these mothers.

I feel crushed; I feel blessed. 

 

There are ways you can help.  Donate.  Raise awareness.  Little things, like daily clicks on the hunger site or playing knowledge games on free rice or taking an awareness quiz.  Sponsors donate in your stead.  I've been giving gifts that relate in some way--such as bottles of Sadia's sauce, which supports a local Somali woman (who is then donating 10% of her proceeds to relief efforts).  Heifer International is another fun way to give a gift--you can purchase a whole animal or a share of one that is given to children and families to help them become to be self-reliant.  Shop fair trade.  And be aware, be kind, be thankful for your own life and the lives of those you love.  I know I am.