Kara Dorris

SOME NOTES ON THE BODY AS A TEXT OF ERASURE

I 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
around her like blood from the body.
Mud and the heat of bared flesh, the
solidity of the body. How it will ache,
bend, and once broken will
flower strangely.

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
the skin pull itself apart, or the red
wet wound, or for the body to interrogate
itself. But you must 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 DORRIS

Salt Meets Wound

On the trans-Siberian railroad,
passing in the hallway,
an old Russian fortuneteller saw
the devil in my forearm,
the way it curved & stunted
itself. As if my bones were a choice
of faith, of fashion, of lifestyle.
She did not see God in my DNA.
I did not tell anyone.

What is the Russian word for devil?
I've often wondered
that day on the train
did she see the devil, or
did she see me?
She could have seen a spider, an inverted tree, a scar.
She might have been praying.

We think we know
what prayer looks like, like we think
we know normal, beauty, & good belong
together. But I want to believe
everyone's worship looks as different as
each strand of DNA,
like my wrist turning
or not turning aside to let
an old Russian lady selling potatoes
pass by, her offerings mashed & glued
machete-like, each plastic wrapping a signature,
her gaze branding my scarred arm
whatever her words meant.

* * *

ELIZABETH BRASHER

Black Burqa

Here is invisibility:
a burqa dictated as a gray shirt from The Gap.
Here is exhibition:
a body bared for a specific audience--a husban
or a crowd of mall shoppers.
The option:
to be rendered a secret; to be commonly pornographic.

To be desired. To be erased.

* * *

Notes on the Body

I am tired of my uterus; I want my elbows
and the bones in my ear.
I want to lick the skin on my shoulders
as it browns in the sun.
My cunt is as common as a colon.
I want to say, with the same naiveté,
Whitman, your grass is my grass.

* * *

Worry

She'll know the blood isn't good. She'll have learned
her body is an embarrassment, and she'll need me
to conceal this new difficulty.

I will explain how her body becomes
cavernous, penetrable,
a dilated mouth,
a throat to swallow the whole.

* * *

SHEILA BLACK

Personal History*

Still it comes back,
the old sensation suffusing
like wine through the tendons,
the shape of what is missing.

I wake in the night,
wishing I could unshed so easily
that stubborn kink, curve
of bone. How could I have
been viewed so wrong?

Good Doctor, you arrive on
the scene wearing the mask of hero,
the uncanny light of your
third eye. Your gloved hands reach
inside me, fingers poised around a chisel.
How can I keep track of
all the changes? The marks
where you stitched me
still here, a line of tracks
cutting a featureless field.

Photographs in the family
album have disappeared,
those left in from above
the waist only. I smile in them
like anyone.

* * *

Persephone

Duck under. The journey to dread
begins in the greening light of growing thingsesign–
crocus, daffodil, lily-of-the-valley
with its scent like the breath of mortal
babes. Early March, the dullard stars
that drift down and are caught in
crab-apple, banks of blossom. The
rivers lined with willows, trailing
hands into mirror-water. On the second
floor, a reoccurring dream in the
house where they haul in the beached
ships, the drowned. Her hair flowering
around her like blood from the body.
Mud and the heat of bared flesh, the
solidity of the body. How it will ache,
bend, and once broken will
flower strangely. And below like a lake
at night under a sky of no moon,
stars, cloud, the face of the girl who
will remain so for always– a
linden tree growing out of the water.
In her hair the flowers, stars of
what she came from, or dreamed, and can
never return to– the heaven that is here,
all around us, but never to be pinned down,
stopped from its relentless blooming.

* * *

CAROL BERG

Abu Ghraib*

Some might say it is not polite to watch
the skin pull itself apart, or the red
wet wound, or for the body to interrogate
itself. But you must watch.
You are not permitted to help.
The preparations: select, pinch
fold and compress. The stretching
and the pulling down. Gravity
with its scraping teeth, with its
twirl & squish.
The slow control of the juice
hardening into crust. A technique
others cannot understand.
A technique with regard
to the bite. The chew.

* * *

JENNIFER BARTLETT

My Body is (the) Marginalia; The Sun Drawn a Saw Across the Strings

Wit is this little dog I am chasing.
Thinking lags behind. All the food is yellow here, an
Australia of leaves. The letter said, when you are in
the room, I am quieted and all is brilliant. I need you
nearby to soak up some of the crazy. In a moment
when we were neither speaking nor thinking of the
other.

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.

Kara Dorris is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. She received her MFA from New Mexico State University in 2009. Her poetry has appeared in The Tusculum Review, The Tulane Review, Harpur Palate, Wicked Alice, Cutbank, Prick of the Spindle, Stone Highway Review, Crazyhorse and Skidrow Penthouse among others literary journals, as well the anthology Beauty is a Verb. Dancing Girl Press published her first chapbook, Elective Affinities, in 2011. Finishing Line Press published her second chapbook, Night Ride Home, in 2012. She is the editor of an online literary journal, Linger post.