Tag Archives: to survival and beyond

Flashback, version one draft 3

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Still rough, more fragmented narrative than poem, all explanation and no music. The struggle continues. Long live the struggle!

Flashback
for Sue and for so long
version 1 draft 3

1.

She straddled my chest, heavy, dripping water—
earliest memory, this dream still vivid, her
long hair hanging down to my face—
I do not remember so much—so much is lost,
nearly all lost, but I feel my toddler legs kicking the bunk
above me in which my big brother slept, smell the

dank of her, hear his mattress rustle, how even
in his sleep my panic stirred him, how he chased her
away again and again, how he held my hand, how he
never went to get our parents.

Somehow that the seven year old boy, kicked awake
every night by his three year old sister, had already
learned that protecting her was his job alone.
I remember how rarely he said
no when I wanted his jacket, his hat, my chunky
arms lost in the echo of his, and how he

did all he could, little one guarding littler one, and how in 1968,
in the hospital, he climbed two chairs and a shelf,
agile as our pet squirrel, to reclaim Brownie Bear, kidnapped by
nurses who said I was too allergic.

2.

Straddling my chest nights after nights,
earning her way into indelible memory. She looked
like my cousin Rhonda—
incomplete recall of cousins tangling to the floor?
Not at three or four—more likely a blurring of Mortica
Adams and Maleficent.

During a body work session, a meditation
intended to draw out the root of my
asthma, I cast her once as metaphor,
nothing more than a child’s mind putting

shape to what it could not comprehend. An
explanation for the memory of her adult body
lodged across my own, the heft of her, how
I felt my lungs compressed like balloons squeezed
nearly to popping, sternum and collar bones splintering—
asthma is a euphemism for

drowning in air, gasping
in and wheezing out—
asthma is the world entire made
narrow as my bronchial tubes.

4.

Sense what that story silences? Water,
everywhere, her clothes and hair saturated,
leaving wet thigh prints on my ribs, damp puddled
in palms restrained by her knees, water in where I had no words, a
nauseating instinct that water could reclaim me, that I was
about to lose the crust that kept me human.

Denial is too easy an answer.
I’ve tried to cast the dream
as suppression—Freudian bed-wetting shame—but that
neglects the choking and my

surety that I knew her, at an age when
everybody I knew or might have known
lived in one of three houses on two streets
in one small town. As sure as I knew my own
name, I was sure she was not
a person who dwelt in my

daytime world. And I knew that
I knew her. She was not
alien, she was terrifying, she was
not new. She was not

separate from me. What sense could I make of that?
Even though I’ve remembered the dream, though it
lingered hours after, though it lingers yet,
it is always only
neurological puzzle, a knowing that I do not know.
A bit of gristle, as Scrooge said, a piece of meat that didn’t

digest. A gallery with a name but empty walls,
installation still in progress. Like lightening seen from far away,
a comprise of silence and thunder. An expectant
null. A crime scene photo, all blood, no face.

5.

She says she knew, from our first date, August
eleventh, that she had loved me all her
lives. She says that this is crazy; there
is no way that she should have felt her
nervous system convulsing when she,
awkwardly, first touched my face.

working drafts – Flashback

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Sections marked in [ ] are waiting for the right words or phrases to fall into place. That happens – either you stop writing to look for the right word and lose the next four ideas, or you leave it bare and come back later. Still writing, of course, which is why it breaks off on the second line of the fourth section.

Flashback
for Sue and for so long

1.

She straddled my chest, heavy, pressing, dripping water—
earliest memory, this dream still vivid, her
long hair hanging over my face
I was so scared, each time she arrived. I do
not remember so much, so much lost, nearly
all lost, but I can feel the mattress under me, be clutched again by the

dread, feel my toddler legs kicking the bunk bed above me
in which slept my big brother, hear his sudden shift as he
awoke, climbed down to me, chased her away again and again. He
never went to get our parents.

2.

Surprised that the seven year old boy, kicked awake
every night by his three year old sister, had already
learned that protecting her was his job alone?
I remember, clear as smog, how rarely he said
no when I wanted his jacket, his hat, my chunky
arms lost in the shape of his, and how he

did all he could, little one guarding littler one, and how once
in the hospital, he climbed two chairs and a shelf,
agile as our pet squirrel, to reclaim my bear Brownie the
nurses had taken from me as I was allergic.

3.

She straddled my chest so many nights,
enough to be indelible memory. She
looked like my cousin Rhonda, so
I tried to remember her as a child’s
inaccurate memory, or maybe a
[ ] of Morticia Adams or [ ], those long
afternoons in the heyday of Dark Shadows.

During a body work session once, in my guided
intention to focus on the root of my
asthma, I understood her as a metaphor,
nothing more than how a child’s mind gave

4.

shape to what it could not comprehend. An
elegant explanation.

rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues

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Carol Burbank:

rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues cut it open, and the sanity of honey pours out between, where meaning lives

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

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Try to Praise the Mutilated World
Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Welcome to Writing the Unthinkable

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from Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Why haven’t you gone out and bought this book already? Jeesh. Do I have to say it again??

There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight.

And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can’t transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.

It seems that human beings everywhere understand that a child who is never allowed to play will eventually go mad. But how do we know this? And why do we know this? And what happens when we forget?

“I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.” I read and re-read Black Beauty as a child, sobbing like the world would end, the description of the torture of the horses almost more than I could bear. But I needed it. It made something real, it told me other people knew about pain.

And I know so many non-Jewish incest victims who, as young teens, were completely fascinated with the Holocaust, all those horrible, awful, brutal details piled up. Some even became obsessed, and developed this weird thing about Jews being the victims we have to all protect (huh, wondering now how much of Christian Zionism this explains???). The ones on the far side of this, the survivors, say plainly that reading the awful stories was a kind of comfort—they made real and physical the level of emotional torment these women faced living in unthinkable circumstances.

Well, not so unthinkable, since the adult perpetrators clearly thought this stuff up and then acted it out in the world. Sometimes I want to know what was so intolerable in their own lives that the scenarios and images they created to make it okay to stay in the world involved hurting children so badly. Guess that is a circular inquiry, though, the question that answers itself forward and backward in time.

If you’ve ever been told you were “too sensitive,” what do you think the motive was behind that particular speech?

Tell/Share/Overshare—when is the line crossed?

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How do I talk about my own life while respecting the boundaries of others? What if, say, I wanted to write about a relationship with someone who is an abuse survivor, and the many things I might have learned from that? Do I have the right to share details of that person’s life in order to write about myself? If I don’t have that right, is that then a silence about my own experience being forced upon me? Where is the line between sharing, oversharing, trust, and betrayal?

I wish I had an easy answer, but I don’t. The paragraphs below are from a longer essay I wrote about Chana Bloch’s book Mrs. Dumpty, in which she chronicles her painful marriage and eventual divorce, both driven by her husband’s mental breakdowns. These are first person, autobiographical poems, and they are powerful and beautiful and so well-crafted, and they left me with a lot of questions.

But there is a larger issue for me at play here, especially after reading the essays in section three, “Degrees of Fidelity: Ethical & Aesthetic Considerations” in After Confession—what does it mean for her husband, and for how she relates to him after these poems, that she has written so beautifully her emotional reality of their marriage? She couldn’t have written her truth without revealing his mental illness, the violence, distance, and institutionalization, but still, those are intimate, and potentially damaging, details of his life. What are the limits of how much of that story was hers to show and to tell? Did the ways that she was harmed by him grant her permission to reveal all of this, in the ways that victims have the moral right to say who did what? Or is the telling itself a kind of emotional payback with a manipulative edge? (In all of her work she seems honest and caring, so this doesn’t feel like the case with her, but god knows there are poems and memoirs that exist for that reason.) I’m struggling hard with this issue right now, as I consider what to do with my own break-up poems, the “you” of which will be furious about when or if she sees them. What, if any, responsibility do I have to share or not share with the world intimate details about her? I’ve tried to protect her (way too much, too often, methinks), to conceal her identity, to not go into stories she revealed to me in intimacy that I think explain her behavior. But, ultimately, where does our right to tell our own story violate another’s right to privacy?

Mrs. Dumpty asks this question, and doesn’t answer it in any way. These are exactly the kind of poems that make male critics lose their minds and start flinging accusations of man-bashing, of some kind of conspiracy of women writers to bring men down (to reveal the nakedness of the fathers?), a trend always at its most hysterical frothing peak when certain African American male critics confront Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. “Who is she to say these things about him?” they scream. As a woman, a feminist, I answer, “She is a writer, and compared to what men have said about women for century after century, I think men are still getting off easy.” But as a poet wrestling with my own balance of honesty and integrity, I don’t have an easy, confident, self-justified answer. And maybe I can’t, or shouldn’t.

new work – A Prayer of Petition

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A Prayer of Petition
Elliott batTzedek

is too easy—ridiculous, pathetic,
to consider that a request, small or 
desperate, could be answered

might be
would be

Save me. Help me. Stop them. Save me.

a child’s refrain

mine

They told me I had a Savior
so I called him every day
ringing ringing ringing ringing ringing
sometimes twice in a day
ringing ringing ringing ringing ringing
until one day
the line was dead
uuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

I had to save myself

about which I remain somewhat bitter

If you can ask with a heart 
you still can open

I am jealous

I am broken

I am not like you

new work – Lullaby

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Lullaby
Elliott batTzedek

What is the oldest true thing
you know 	      and how
does it bind you?

Softly, I pray for you, gently—
Mississippi River silt, puppy ears, bunny fur,
Downy, Charmin, Palmolive

or if rigidly     	 then may it, I pray,
be the spine that keeps you upright
as the cedars of Lebanon

Mine wraps me tight	      so calm so
reassuring, lullabying its sweet refrain:
there is no place for you in this world

there is no    place         for you          in this world
there is no   there is no   there is no    there is no place
there is no   there is no   there is no    there is no you

Here

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                           Here
                    Chana Bloch

                      Anything
                even the black
         satin road where it catches
       the streaked oils of stoplights
          as I drive home alone
             from the hospital
        rain pocking the windshield
       tires slicing the pooled water
       to a spume taller than the car.
      Even that patch where the road
     fell in, rutted as a face, even that
             cries out: Look at me
            don’t turn away, admit
            the ravage is beautiful.
       The world insists: I was here
          before you and your pain,
                  I am here and I
          will outlast you. Yes, says
             the mind stroking itself
                   into life again
                 as a body, taking
                    what comfort
                        it can.

from Mrs. Dumpty, an astounding collection of poems about the end of Bloch’s marriage, about how love is born and how it dies.

new work up – Ken and I Were Dykes

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Look in “Creative Nonfiction” for the first section of a new long essay whose working title is “Gender: A non-theoretical autobiography.” Section one is called “Ken and I Were Dykes”