Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Orser: Despite distortions, I want to know my contemporary moment

© Dee Rimbaud

(Despite distortions, I want to know my contemporary moment)
by Kristen Orser

We internalize stories that aren't true: The moon under the woman is pitted and irregular.
The same said of the woman who cannot know when she will bleed next and is gagged with
pollen.

If it isn't salt water, the woman isn't clean—she is a salamander constructed of sorry.
Please confess to having the wind knocked out, to having the madness of ellipicity. Yes, I am
rounded in a doll and quieted in a male ear. Is that surprising? I take an ugly picture and am
somehow embarrassed enough to tell you that Emily Dickinson wasn't a small woman.

ii.

Each time I set my house on fire and still there are crab spiders inside instead of outside.
My body is not a house and cannot confess itself: I am afraid of my mother—all the wilted
things that make me want to cultivate asparagus, dark shadows, and a decapitated version of the
child who will never be my own child.

I know my looking like a question looks like curiosity, like three dimensionality—it
seems my questions are ribboned and I've watched my sister consider her finger in the anger of
her throat. I have never seen my father consider how closely related the root is to the flower: He
gently tugged the Jet Star out of the ground and I saw its vulnerables whiten before he pressed it
into a crowded perception of a flowering thing.

Pull the mask: Who isn't hysterical? In terms of intense undoing: Shhhhhhh.

iii.

Everything is twenty years late. There are spittle bugs on all the Catawba grapes. My mother can't say sorry for her deep chasm, conviction that she is trampled and out of breath. My mother is asthmatic, is a rare exception in a family that can't come back from always, has complicated feelings about bodies: Two times she was cut open and the thing she was carrying was screaming, the thing she was carrying was also opened.

And so we yellowed—sister and mother and self, jaundiced to the point of irretrievability.
We begin our own destruction, which takes a lifetime. All of us mothers.

I am not convinced I don't have brilliant horns. I experience the world without eyes:
There is the feeling of everything dropping to my bottom and no words to talk about this
extending mind, how it wants to be instant and lanterned. I associate lemon with hurts and
remember the time I looked in the mirror and saw four persons looking back, looking like me. In
fact, I reach my arm around my head and see Medusa laughing. You thought she was
screaming?

iv.

It's a poem when we cannot reconcile: The occasioned missile was not a theory. All the
women ask why they haven't melted in the heat of their own body:

What would happen if I was on time for dinner or resigned to come out of bed? I have no
intention of telling secrets, but I so want to know why there are so many places in the
body to fold unfamiliars.

I've asked my mother, “Why do you think I am always lying?” She screamed and I
was afraid the sound of her screaming would never stop. “Mother, why do I always tell
the people I love I hate them?” My mother threw herself into the river.

I've stopped asking questions to anything but the sugar ants. I'm afraid they'll die when
spring ends and I'll be alone again thinking of a story I'd like to tell and not knowing how to tell
it. I contemplate the contemporary and it doesn't move past my own hands, which is as far
outside of myself as I can see. I see less far inside myself. Can we talk about my ovulation?
Can we take some time to listen to how many times my eyeball turns into my head?

Perhaps I am saying I and it is as unfamiliar as any other object or self. This is my voice
in my head, which is unlike the voice I hear when I am hearing my own voice and that is unlike
the voice others hear when they are hearing my own voice. It is from the body and can go higher
and lower, but never seems to match the voice I hear inside my head when I think I am hearing
my own voice.

vi.

Even the vocabulary wants to be forgiven for not being my own vocabulary. I want to be
forgiven for my confused biology, the many times I have killed a centipede and felt ashamed.
Mostly, I write and the neighbors plant begonias. I have never fattened enough to birth
something new, but I have put seeds in the ground.

Kristen Orser coedits The South Loop Review and Reconfigurations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Cannot Exist, If Poetry Journal, Indefinite Space, Ab Ovo, Womb Poetry, and elsewhere. Her two forthcoming chapbooks are: E AT I (Wyrd Tree Press) and Fall Awake (Taiga Press).