Kara DorrisSOME NOTES ON THE BODY AS A TEXT OF ERASUREI once took The Velveteen Rabbit hostage with sharpie markers, glue, scissors, and a Vogue magazine. I colored, marked-out, decoupaged the original and turned it into text on the nature of beauty and reality and fashion. I made it my own. The body is a text with multiple authors–in this sense, we are all texts of erasure and all authors of erasure texts– disabled or not. We overlay our own interpretations onto the bodies of strangers passing by, as they overlay their interpretations onto our bodies. We take the bits we see, interpret (read), and create lives and poems. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know– that we use our own experiences and beliefs (because those experiences are the most real and immediate) to define ourselves and others is our natural "default setting" according to writer, David Foster Wallace. But we can choose a different lens; we can choose awareness, acceptance, and compassion regarding the otherness of others. I had three surgeries in three years and won't have anymore. The first time I tried to erase a part of myself I was 15; the doctors encouraged me, my mother gave permission. When I was 12, I realized my body was different; I slowly began the process of hiding it. Two bone spurs stuck out happily on the inside of my left knee; one was shaped like a golf ball, the other like a dulled arrowhead. When I walked, my knees literally knocked together, bruising. Those two bone spurs were not the only two I had sticking out through my skin, but they were the ones I hated the most. I wanted them gone. Surgery one. Surgery two: My left arm is two inches shorter than my right with limited mobility. I tried to play the piano, type stories, but bone spurs within my joints, invisible to you or me without an x-ray, prevented me from turning my wrist downwards. To play the piano keys, to type, I held my entire shoulder and elbow up and out at a 45 degree angle. So doctors flipped the bone, inserted metal plates to force submission, and then I could play the piano better, type at this computer. Surgery three: those metal plates, foreigners within my body, had to be unscrewed and taken out. Somewhere in my teenage brain, I thought with enough surgery I could make my body normal. But after my knobby knee, crooked forearm, I just latched onto the baseball size bone spur on my left ankle. I wanted to destroy it. It is still there. I won't surgery it away; the surgeries would never end. Why tell you all this? Because this is one lens through which I see the body, as something to change or hide. I'm interested in the lenses through which you see yourself and others. Plath wrote "a door opens, a door shuts. In between, you have had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city…so a poem takes place." But it is more than circumstance; the poem is infiltrated by the poet's memory. These are my memories. I am interested in poems from dual perspectives; how through the development of self through narrative, we both help and hinder ourselves and others, never fully negotiating the resulting comforts and consequences. The poems I've chosen below encourage us to watch the uncomfortable moments, the awkward, the searching, the railing and praying moments. Some of these moments are erased and replaced, some moments we choose to erase by the act of writing, some erase themselves because they are too painful, some erase bits of ourselves along the way, but all add to own own perspectives. Elizabeth Brasher's poem "Black Burqa" points out only two options for the female body: "To be desired. To be erased." Where is the in between? If we are not deemed attractive, do we no longer exist? Can we write around this perceived duality? In "Notes on the Body," Brasher is saying, there is no power in the writing if we must write the body in pieces. Exactly. We can't just write the parts we want others to see or only the parts we want to see. However, we can cut and cover the body, the original text, to erase and remake. Not even when viewing the body as an object or an item, as in Jennifer Bartlett's poem, can we see the body stripped bare because the items we surround ourselves with (dreams, prayer, love, an unmade bed) color all perceptions. But if only two options exist for the female body, what happens to the in between invisible and desired? How do we define different? Who defines? How do we classify oddities within the body? In Sheila Black's "Personal History," the body remembers, never forgets the "old sensation suffusing / like wine through the tendons, / the shape of what is missing." The speaker asks herself: "How could I have been viewed so wrong?" Why did family, doctors, the world see something wrong with the unusual curved angles of the body? In "Persephone," Black writes Her hair flowering What we've learned: the body perseveres, adapts itself to survival. What about in between invisible, different, and desired? What about the ordinary? In Brasher's poem "Worry," a mother ponders the advice she will give her daughter on her developing body: "She'll have learned / her body is an embarrassment, and she'll need me / to conceal this difficulty." Even though the body is inevitably changing, we are taught to hate this transformation. Through this hate, the body "becomes a cavernous, penetrable, / a dilated mouth, / a throat to swallow the whole." We learn that sometimes you just try to hide your body and hide from it. Sometimes your perceptions and the perceptions of others swallow you whole. The body is asking to be broken because it is constantly in a state of breaking itself down. Even though we are aware of this process, we shy away from the body when it isn't 20 something and lithe. Carol Berg's "Abu Ghraib" begins Some might say it is not polite to watch At the end of the day, we are all "red wet wounds." And we watch, we read, we interpret each other. And we write poems. And you read them. KARA DORRISSalt Meets Wound On the trans-Siberian railroad, What is the Russian word for devil? We think we know * * * ELIZABETH BRASHERBlack Burqa Here is invisibility: * * * Notes on the Body I am tired of my uterus; I want my elbows * * * Worry She'll know the blood isn't good. She'll have learned a part of itself, rubbing against itself, knuckles against knuckles. I will explain how her body becomes * * * SHEILA BLACKPersonal History* Still it comes back, I wake in the night, Good Doctor, you arrive on Photographs in the family * * * Persephone Duck under. The journey to dread * * * CAROL BERGAbu Ghraib* Some might say it is not polite to watch * * * JENNIFER BARTLETTMy Body is (the) Marginalia; The Sun Drawn a Saw Across the Strings Wit is this little dog I am chasing. The clouds looked like drawings from the Simpsons. You were in love but this love was not real. It's a real break-up. I had never been so despairing and lonely. * * * There are too many items in this house. I am one of these items. The cat is an item. Jeffrey and Geo are items. The husband with potatoes is an item. My dreaming. The dogs, items. My sorrow, an item. The Lithuanians, they are items too. Lucy is also an item. These books are items. My prayers for Swathi are an item. My unmade bed, my namelessness, my attempt at words, my copy of Cancer Ward, my desire for your body, my wish to go to Russia, the love of this family, mail, the tiles, the titles, my heart. Items, all. * * * Jennifer Bartlett is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image and (a) lullaby without any music. She is co-editor with Michael Northen and Sheila Black of Beauty is a Verb: The New Disability Poets. She is currently researching a biography on Larry Eigner, writing a memoir titled "My Body is the Marginalia," and recently compiled an Electronic Poetry Center page for the late Mary Rising Higgins. Carol Berg's poems are forthcoming or in The Bakery, Fifth Wednesday Journal, qarrtsiluni, Noctua Review, and elsewhere. Two chapbooks, Ophelia Unraveling (dancing girl press), and Small Portrait and the Woman Holding A Flood In Her Mouth (Binge Press), are forthcoming. She blogs at http://carolbergpoetry.blogspot.com/ Author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both CW Press), Sheila Black co-edited with Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press). A third collection Wen Kroy is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press. She received the Witter Bynner Fellowship in Poetry in 2012 selected by Philip Levine. Elizabeth Brasher completed her MFA in poetry at New Mexico State University , where she currently teaches composition and creative writing. She is an assistant editor for Bone Bouquet, an online journal of women's poetry. Her poems have appeared in Lingerpost, and she has published reviews in Puerto del Sol and Feminist Review. She lives in Las Cruces with her husband and their two children.
*An earlier version of Sheila Black's "Personal History "appeared on the Guardian poetry workshop website. Carol Berg's "Abu Graib" was previously published in ProtestPoems.org.
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