“We gave birth to so many babies our uterus slipped out and we had to wear a special girdle to keep it inside. We almost gave birth but the baby was turned sideways and all that came out was an arm. We almost gave birth but the baby’s head was too big and after three days of pushing we looked up at our husband and said, “Please forgive me,” and died.”
(The body as foreign / grotesque,
the body as impending death.)
Last night’s dream:
A lost child. About 7, 8 years old. Girl child. Expression of a face that had been wiped. Back erect, expectant. I was in charge of watching her, charged by whom, I don’t know. Her face got muter and muter and finally she hid herself in some corner I couldn’t reach.
Time passes whether or not I document it.
I used to approach journalling as a means of getting rid of thoughts in my head, the adage of “getting the crap down on the page” /
But really, sometimes documenting feels like creating. What is the difference between writing what’s already there, vs, creating something out of nowhere as you write /
Which means, if I’m getting too much junk down on the page, haphazard, bonafide, junk, so that instead of clearing my head I end up creating chaos. Making messes.
Better not document. Or, better yet, better document differently.
I met with D today and we tried to talk poetry, somatics, creating with/in the body, all of which ended up giving us headaches.
Didn’t take too long to ditch that, shut up, do 5-minute speed sketches of each other, instead. Quietly, quietly.
I made soup today to make the house smell familiar again. Familiar like unadulterated by worry /
I was gone for two weeks (race and creative writing conference in Montana, then a roadtrip all the way to Louisiana and back) and came back to a house besieged under a thin film of abandonment.
Yes, musty, but, also, I think I’m about to kick up a lot of changes with my life, and I have neglected somehow to fully grasp the consequences.
I bought a whole chicken, butchered it into pieces, and made soup, all the while clutching my middle, something inside me throbbing with pain, me walking slightly bowlegged like I’m not actually walking around, I’m not actually real, I’m not actually trying to cook a thing to cure something inside me:
How do you say it.
Ginger red wine chicken soup (or drunken chicken soup) sets me right again like a hug from the inside.
Again and again.
Day 1: Tidy desk
Day 2: Mess up desk
Day 3: Move books to the floor
Day 4: To the bed
Day 5: To the couch
Day 6: To the kitchen table
Day 7: Run out of surfaces on which to have sex
