Content Warning: These poems contain graphic imagery including a reference to a suicide attempt.
Starting with the Natural World
-for aaron anthony sorensen
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
You were always and never
Not here
A perfect shape
Cupped in my hands
As muted sand
Becomes blown glass
Like the moon’s
Alabaster salt flats
Its trajectory placed
On the tongue singing as
Tide pools do
Beneath heavy rain
Fissures of leaves
Adding their imprints
Across shortened days
No sound but your voice
Following a steady road
I am not like Mary
Watching her son
Hang from a thread
Of splintering wood
Unlike her
My eyes will follow
Your perfect outline
And recognize it as my own
No nails will ever be riven
Into your feet and hands
And this I do
Know for certain
Our bodies will never
Petrify into a pieta
And that you have always been
Here with me
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Disfigurement
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
It was in summer when he tried
to stop the voices and the erratic movements
only he could see out of the corners of his eyes.
My brother heard distant tree branches cracking
and he spiraled down into the snare
of schizophrenia, into a black tumult of waves
with their salted immensity, then aimed a gun
with a shaking hand and shot a bullet into his brain.
Teal sky hovered above the front yard’s magnolia tree
as it dropped innumerable white petals,
like intimate cicatrix emerging through an evening mist,
too many to count. Winter came suddenly
with sandpaper ocean drizzle, evoking
aging boardwalks, icicles clinging beneath them.
Our mother waited and riffled through old photos
of him as a boy sliding down snow
embankments with the Atlantic spitting out tufts
of seaspray behind him. She waited, half-hoping
he would never wake from the coma,
and this hoping only a mother is allowed.
But he did come back to life,
the bullet carved out from his brain, leaving jagged scars.
There would be a long semblance of healing,
a semblance because the unanswered would remain
hard like hidden nails or shrapnel with accusatory points:
Who is to blame? Who is to blame?
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Adaptation
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
Penciled-in trees overlap with telephone poles
marking the casual way the neurosurgeon instructs
me. In just a few weeks, he will cut into my brain. I
half-listen, yet fully watch
how the sun is surpassed by clouds
and realize my body is just as someone would sketch
it: smudged and stricken with rough-hewn lines. A
human body is on a list of things
that occupy the same space
the same dimension as any other shape,
as common as a triangle or circle.
Now in the midst of disease,
this neurologic, shaking illness,
I feel myself becoming what is opposite,
separated or divided
not fully imbricated, not fully creased or folded,
not salient, or stitched tightly like scales
on a fish but rather something lightly borne
and dropped suddenly, a simple outline
resembling the muted
arrangement of an early morning sky.
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About the Author
Barbara Ellen Sorensen lives with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). The three poems published in this issue of Wordgathering have to do with three types of brain maladies that are affected by dopamine. With PD, Barbara lives with the depletion of dopamine. Her son Bryon died as the result of an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) which is found to produce low levels of dopamine. Barbara’s brother lives with paranoid schizophrenia which is, conversely, when the brain produces too much dopamine. A regular contributor to the Tribal College Journal as well as a book reviewer for Mom Egg Review, Barbara has published three books of poetry and numerous nonfiction essays. She and her husband live in Pinewood Springs, Colorado.