Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  3 poems from OCCULTATIONS

  (muted domestic pornography)

  DISTRACTION ZONE STAGING: written while watching 1) online homemade pornography (no audio), and 2) surgical imaging stills of the inside of my urinary tract. Oscillating between viewing (1) and (2), 30 second intervals.

  1.

  Never so held in held

  Suspense : the long

  Disease is pornographic

  Graphic despite I knowing

  What will come of this

  This narrative as usual

  As so much underpaid

  Hunger there is some I

  Tensing with a perverting here

  Here the sheen of a slowly open

  Curve a depth I’ve seen this before

  Before I roamed corporate clinics

  My holes are a constant testing

  Ground perpetual breaks of strata

  In continuity becomes continuity : I

  I here cannot see is a here with yet no

  Name his delivery system holds I up

  Up by its penis a story halos above

  It : degraded lyric as convergence of aporias

  The strange tremor the unusual poverties

  Of not knowing what will come of this

  2.

  I huddles in that middle zone between distraction and contraction—

  “that is my job,” said an old woman, my grandmother

  were she still alive, then later with so

  many strings attached, hazard

  lights marionetting her sagging refills, “how do you work

  this thing?”

  pressing prosthetic buttons furious & impatient—

  the bed’s not a coffin it’s a video game! & only because

  my job is to thread that somewhere, where here is,

  impossibly, what I

  can do, it’s the lack part of it

  that allows “I” to appear where it does, & “my”

  possessed to push thru this

  night,

  tell you a story from yr past,

  where rehearsal will have taken the shape of

  sheets, its body’s impression made,

  seen only after—& in its dissipative, changing telling

  DISTRACTION ZONE STAGING: written in rain 34F, just after running for one hour on treadmill at midnight with neuromuscular disease—exploration of Appendix M of CIA Interrogations Manual: stress holds.

  3. (corporeal self-punishment)

  this poem wants 1:17 to perform sextual acts

  on whatever grammar trick counts as its pleasure

  center, pop up thru what it did to it-

  selves 1:22 declaration desecration calls

  crawls from in side, can feel it this basic 1:25

  training

  (pop up was the first phrase that came

  to mind!. to minded!!. what does

  that say about this mind? what does it say

  about this mined that a post-facto 1:27

  deep read in our dark parking lot assumes

  eupham eupham

  euthanistic thinking on my

  other part? )

  got a phrase stuck in my mindless

  phytness jaunt, EXTREME POETRY

  up in shiny red lights, above a strip

  mall’s not-yet-empty storefront, & like

  all poetry ideas 1:31, this one non-

  profit too but w/ low flying over

  head we would sell only hardcover 1:33 hard-

  core poetry booklets & shakes & protein

  by the bulk up more, a place where all

  the manlee conceptual poets could go to rest

  to test their endurance for the reading

  (digging thru land

  fill to find this corpse)

  1:34 knotted urethra song a song not

  to be written, knot now & the radiate. the

  radiate. the irradiated, why we don’t

  run, & is ex-ercise proof 1:37 left

  side burns feels punched 1:38 is exercise

  poof of self hood?

  poem all by its self-

  help the lone foodstuff on

  that night conveyer belt

  of self-evident uncivil

  obedience, neck in

  spasm pen a loose nail 1:41

  it stoops a chance

  of witness if it asks 1:42 whose

  running who

  DISTRACTION ZONE STAGING: written while being fed my writing—one hour of handwritten “confessional poetry”—as exploration of Appendix M of CIA Memorandum on use of food as tool for interrogation.

  (forced feeding 1)

  my at home ex

  perience @ kitchen skin sink

  —ing

  thru w/ the teleo-vision he says

  open wide

  we need an enhanced sit

  -uational understanding

  blood-

  sugar poeman introverted inverted milgram

  ex-peri-mint

  “Eat Up” “Eat Shit” “Shut Up” “Stand

  Down”

  wears a hogtied sauce

  rouge, mouth the entire apparatus

  a protrusion dug into, some bodys

  looking for some things

  a chocolate de clares: yr thru w/ And Now We Shall Faster engine work

  —ing on come

  —ing

  a rhyth mea culpa Is

  morsel code, my drums tap says-cant-think

  whatever comes, leeks

  out

  (the un

  willing mute)

  whyle he

  stuffs gas-o-

  line

  rag In whole hole

  & says talk all ready, tell us what

  You Want to Know

  (charitable giving surveys

  the eyes for signs of death’s witness this

  intelligent gathering)

  unfettered by intel over

  site my personal MP calls

  this intercourse

  a tasting of power

  play plated, public shame

  —ing

  dines out-ed, can feel the hand

  wipe

  —ing the lips, so i refluxively bend

  over

  Kara Dorris

  BENIGN BONE TUMOR CITY

  For years I avoided writing about my disability. How did one avoid sounding melodramatic and self-pitying? My own poetics lean towards erasing, running and eventually disassembling illusions. But I couldn’t help being a critical reader of my body. Have I always considered myself disabled? Short answer:yes and, of course, no.

  My mother, brother and I suffer, perhaps I should say we have, we own osteocondromas (bone tumor growths). Excess calcium pools or dams at the joints. As we grew, so did the bone spurs, interfering with normal growth patterns. So yes, my right leg is shorter, my right arm is several inches longer, and I have strange knobs of bone sticking out. All that said, I walk, jog if I must, dance and hopscotch (although not well or gracefully), but mostly I read, sink into fairytales through Angela Carter’s eyes.

  What does all this mean? It means that I never knew my body was supposed to act differently, that the body often compensates without conscious effort (that I should be ashamed of my body, that I shouldn’t?). Can you miss something you’ve never had?

  So I write. I write to merge the gap between who I think I should be (want to be) and who I am. I strap on poems, masquerade, murderess-dress because I am not dangerous or wild or carefree and sometimes I want to be. I want to be Cindy Sherman or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Anna Karenina, to write past fact and role-play, become a catalyst, a poem, a temporary, pseudo-escape from the body and personality (and as T.S. Eliot said, only people with emotions and personalities want to escape from them). A silent mode of transportation. And yes, I know, I never really become her; I never escape myself.

  So I write more. I believe part of what I struggle to do is to write the female body, t
o write the female body as choice and art, to write the female body as deformed/choice/art. I could say, I do this, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, to “place me nakedly face to face with both terror and anger”...the breakdown of the world as I have always known it, the end of safety...the end of hiding, but not entirely of wanting to. I’m still rebelling.

  Sometimes the notion of calling myself disabled makes me want to disappear, but the baseball-sized tumor on my ankle is indestructible. I cover myself in leg warmers and sweaters. In sixth grade the school nurse diagnosed me with scoliosis; all day I thought I was deformed; I was ill. She was wrong, but until then, I’d never considered how my body might be different. I want my body to have purpose. Not me, you see, it’s a common mistake, I mean, my body, this vessel. How to show you? The most damaging tumors are deep within tissue and ligament, and you can only see the beauty and mass destruction, the clusters shaped like Marilyn Monroe in X-rays.

  In order to make sense of it, I need to chart my way to the reasons within my body, which, in turn, shape the reasons of me. Why I, rare genetic bone disorder, benign tumor cavity, am a city. Why cities like mine aren’t beauty. In pictures I can’t help but see the stunted growth, and when I stretch I feel the tendons scraping, tearing over tumors. How can that be beauty?

  I can’t live in my city for long with ankles that tremble under my weight as if I’m always one second from buckling. I need to create new towns and cattle-guard the city limits. I’ve had tumors removed, but the inflammation and ripping still occurs. For every one tumor removed, a hundred remain because the tumors aren’t invaders, they are my body, entwined with muscles, tendons and veins. So I wear strategic clothes and walk slow, let others step me into their version of existence.

  In “A Season in Hell,” Rimbaud says: “À chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues” [To me it seemed that to every being several other lives were owed]. I believe this because I’ve spent a lifetime reading about those who live, living those other lives as doctors told me be careful, don’t play sports or roughhouse because an already broken body shouldn’t be broken again.

  So I carry other writers inside me—Barthes’ and Jenny Boully’s discourses of the body and identity, Keats’ ideas of beauty and negative capability, Tim O’Brien’s search for the human heart and mind—and I write and I walk a line between wanting (What? Another body, a better body, a sense of self-rightness, plastic surgery?) and wanting to the point of deformity.

  I believe, as James Branch Cabel wrote, “poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” Through poetry, the poet is trying to define herself and her perceptions of the world. Through my writing, I am seeking to trace and retrace myself, my strange and estranged body and learn how to live best within it. I can’t name each tumor yet, although I realize each unseen cluster is its own city limits. You see, I have a lifetime to map them out, but I still can’t fully accept this reality, imagine this tumor-ridden body when I imagine myself. Does my body make me disabled or do my perceptions of my body? Rich says, “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we can never know ourselves.”

  Self-Portrait with Framing Effect

  Sitting behind a screen

  underneath blankets of leopards

  & running stitches,

  I almost forget I am a frame job:

  It’s delinquent, an inamorata butcher

  & cracked fang of things I’ve collected:

  diamond cut vignettes

  panoramic Venus hips

  chase soundtracks.

  Like potassium or plums

  our bones produce, contract, read—

  how I sponge-curl my hair

  or knife an apple.

  Swirl

  my 2 umbrellas, the one above

  my drink & the one in my head.

  Try through leather straps & steel pins

  to mash limbs together

  (I say again, to mash together again,

  but the idea that I was ever

  whole

  is a fable, a myth my mother told

  when I couldn’t sleep).

  Flags,

  my flush face in the crowd,

  the smokestacks.

  A crow necklace is just the black

  feathers of operation,

  another anesthesiologist saying,

  she’s under.

  It took less than a crash to take me apart,

  but Greyhound

  is what I remember.

  All those dead babies & smooth limbs

  I couldn’t feel

  that might have been my own.

  Red beads mean something.

  That birds love when I wear my hair down?

  But is it my hair or a monkey’s hand?

  In my first surgery, I flipped

  everyone off, handed out the bird,

  kept the pulse light up in faces, bright.

  After, I tried to sit up by myself

  secretly in front of surgeons

  & the maize behind,

  yes, the maze you gimp through.

  (One gimp knows another.)

  Chlorine hands—

  Nowhere else but here.

  Don’t you see?

  Our swimming pool doesn’t use chlorine.

  A girl who stands in doorways.

  I’ve never come this far before.

  Never drown.

  Momma, isn’t that all I’ve ever done?

  Breton’s Song of the Lark

  At the end of wheat,

  where gold-dust stalks lean, sway

  away & are pulled back,

  is the moment you know what calls to you.

  Scythe in hand, barefoot halo, you

  dress in a ruby-pinked sun as if to kill.

  Your strawflower sack skirt suspended

  like the step forward you were taking

  before your feet heated in want.

  & now you know. Tightness

  so stretched you’re unable to move.

  Why you turned from

  the timbered cottage burned, simmered

  by the sun

  you clothed yourself in.

  Fist clinched. Mouth sighed open.

  Unable to embody dusk-dark rapture,

  the wanton need to be—

  teacup overflowing.

  To feel the wisps of wheat on your feet

  that foretell seasons. A halo of egg whites.

  You, a dandelion blown, a backlit quarry, a bonfire.

  How that husk grain should have been

  a deeper shell, shelf, shelter.

  Fairytale: How Spring Comes to the Land

  of Snow and Icicles/(Dream Map)

  The body burns & smells like fake,

  like ammonia & blood & guts.

  Barbie leg arrows,

  black & white bust sizes,

  swords as houses, & you swing it all.

  Say, all you want to do is fuck.

  Because between it &—

  a place we invent to need

  even as we know not this skin.

  Why else this plastic design,

  our bodies:

  jello or scar?

  I say, save the grotesque & it saves you.

  I say, wish us open, cupped, surgeon knots

  in the form of girly stuff:

  gothic lipstick,

  sedimentary mascara,

  arabesque eyelashes.

  Yes, a circle, a light, an allow.

  Wanting to Be a Girl

  When I close my octopus eyes, I see 4 arms, 4 legs lift. I want only 2 of each. The sky said stay, meant to be, this parasitic twin, a bleed to what a girl should be. But I ache for what my body is—fused spines, one heart dissolved in another, doubled ribs protecting lotus flower lungs. For what it could be—knee socks & Mary Janes. To stake flags marking the scatter pattern of debris: an arm, a metacarpal, an earring, a virginity. Who does a goddess pray to?

  I asked the sea, help me lose th
is extra being. I swam through skins, churning placentas, breathed wide open, pulled oxygen through 4 eyes, exposed my vertebrae, double-edged knobs. Cast back. Even a sea wants to worship something.

  Gretchen E. Henderson

  POETICS / “EXHIBITS”

  For over a decade, I’ve carried around the word “disabled” with an agitated ambivalence that has slowly (in)formed a generous and generative aesthetic of deformity. Jim Ferris has written intricately about “The Enjambed Body,” drawing upon A.R Ammons’ description (“A poem is a walk”), adding of himself: “when I walk, I aim to get somewhere. If my meters are sprung, if my feet are uneven, if my path is irregular, that’s just how I walk. And how I write.”1 The prose poem, boxed as it is, for me seems to embody a want for movement—physical, aural and otherwise—made apparent by limitations and liminality of its boxed-in body. My poetics arise from a curiosity and hope for whatever movements occur within this boxed-in body: at times dueling with, but fueling, shifting perceptions within the sentence of each sentence.