Cobb 1
THE CONTEMPORARY INTERPELLATION OF WOMEN THROUGH POETRY AND THE HEBREW
BIBLE
and THE RIB BRIDGE: A POETRY COLLECTION
______
A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College
Ohio University
______
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation
from the Honors Tutorial College
with the Degree of Bachelors of Arts in English
______
Olivia Cobb
April 2018
Cobb 2
Table of Contents
In The Beginning: A Critical Introduction… 3
Why Women … 4
Choosing the Words … 9
Gathering the Biblical Information … 12
Writing the Words … 20
Man and Woman, He Created Them … 28
Poems
Becoming Woman … 29
Mothers … 42
Romance … 56
Violence … 71
Cobb 3
In the Beginning: A Critical Introduction
The goal of this collection is to complicate the dialogues of womanhood. I chose to combine my poetic perspective of womanhood with that of biblical woman. Alice Ogden Bellis writes, “stories have been used against women, but stories can also provide tools to use in the struggle for wholeness and dignity” (3). Stories are capable of creating a new reality, a different perception. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, we are “impressionable and vulnerable […] in the face of a story” (Adichie). Framing narratives in the voice of the feminine demystifies the statue of female “other.” This collection creates the female voice as the “I” instead of the Other. I do this by reframing the stories of the Hebrew Bible through the eyes of the female characters.
By initiating each major theme with a poem told from the voice of a woman from the origins of
Christian womanhood, I lend legitimacy and belonging to the contemporary female voices that follow. This collection expands through poetry to unfold a series of complicated and unanswerable questions, all of them asking, what does it mean to be a woman?
In my poems and related scholarship, I aim to answer Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s call to construct a narrative as an act of deconstruction. I aim to replace patriarchal narratives with a more complex story. Hélène Cixous writes that the “feminine practice of writing […] will always exceed the discourse governing the phallocentric system” (Easthope162). I want my work to include voices that do not always have the chance to speak and be heard, let alone speak and be respected. This collection—based on the work of scholars such as Carol Meyers, Alice Ogden
Bellis, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Kate Millet, and Simone De Beauvoir—acts as a reconstruction of the stories we tell about the Hebrew Bible and the women in it. It takes a careful look at how we tell the story of womanhood, past and present. I chose to break up my body of work into four sections: Becoming Woman, Romance, Violence, and Mothers. These Cobb 4 sections represent four concepts that are regularly portrayed as characteristic of the cultural ideal feminine experience. If you call yourself a woman, chances are someone or something along the way has hailed you into one of these categories of essential womanhood, of mother, of lover of men, of victimhood. The poems are placed to both challenge and expose different expressions of violence, romance, essentialism, or motherhood as I have seen women experience and present it.
Why Women?
The inclusion of Biblical voices was a strategic one. In the words of feminist scholar
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “[s]o often we act out the present against the backdrop of the past,”
(90). There is power in working with origins. Carol Meyers writes, “too often, emotional justification for the existence and continuation of present unacceptable gender roles or behaviors is embedded in religious tests that shape our collective psyche” (7). The U.S. roots itself in an understanding of ideals constructed from the Hebrew Bible. Major cultural decisions are made or broken by the narrative we, as a social group, have created from the Bible and its interpretations.
To reframe the narrative of womanhood we must work with the same materials as the original story.
The importance of biblical stories has a heavy effect on how we define womanhood, as stated by Meyers who writes, “as the first woman, Eve Symbolizes all women” (1). For this reason I chose my poem, “Eve on the Subject of Original Sin,” to open the collection. This piece uses a chatty voice to align the original Hebrew story, in which Adam and Eve are both present for the warning and temptation of the fruit, with the cultural retelling of Eve tempting an innocent Adam. Eve claims her story in my poem, telling the reader that she has always known that “we would have to keep going.” This opening declaration by Eve, the epitome of woman Cobb 5 leads into a poem titled “Things to Let Go of (A Midmorning Prayer)” (Meyers 1). This list poem records a series of anxiety-driven concerns of a female speaker unable to let go of her worries. She prays to the reader, asking to release “my fear of God, / the terror of being known, the terror of being unknown” alongside the boys she once loved. Eve is mad that we look at her as a temptress. The next speaker is mad that she looks at herself as a collection of faults. The juxtaposition encourages readers to examine the perceptions of female self and personhood.
What does it mean to these speakers to live as women? The matching of biblical and contemporary pairs their similarities in theme—as well as their disparities in respect and legitimacy—to show that the shared themes and understandings must be acknowledged.
Throughout my writing, biblical scholarship remains central to my construction of identity and voice. Beyond the bounds of Eve, Bathsheba, Dinah, etc., the biblical scholarship also allowed me to expand narratives of the modern voices I use through out my collection.
Navigating through the plurality of perspective in biblical scholarship, captured by the declaration that there is “not […] a single feminist reading of a biblical woman’s story,” granted me room to practice interpreting from a variety of viewpoints (Bellis 210). This process of unfolding became a way for me to examine my own experiences of womanhood. Why not, I thought, combine the two? I put together poems written from the perspective of characters in the
Hebrew Bible with confessional poetry so that readers could critically examine their religio- cultural conception of gender and their currently held beliefs side-by-side. My hope is that this work encourages people to inspect their own relationship with the divine and look at how that relationship contributes to the stories that create their identities. By reimagining women’s voices, bodies, authority, autonomy, and ideals, into the creation myths that act as the foundation of present day (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) society, we develop a more nuanced and equalitarian Cobb 6 expression of gendered politics. There is power in the materials we use to create our beginnings, and I want to look carefully at that power.
Feminist scholarship, as I use it in this project, identifies the pervasive ideas of patriarchal culture on current social practice. This scholarship revolves largely around writers such as Mohanty, Meyers, Millet, and Cixous, who all examine the creation of gender and the reactions of society to the categories it overlays. It turns its eye to the construction of culture; it examines how gender creates itself and shapes the space around it. Largely, the scholarship I have used to through out this project examines the cultural realities surrounding De Beauvoir’s assertion that woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her” (Easthope 52). I have found it most productive to examine the role of woman as the Other through the Hebrew Bible as it distances us from our daily existence through the practicality of time and space. I use this distance as a poetic tool. It allows me to closely examine how we socially format the questions we ask and answers we give with respect to the history of women and their role in the Hebrew Bible. In the poem “Bathsheba,” I attempt to first and foremost grant Bathsheba a voice. With the lines, “He saw me bathing on the roof / and he did not wait for me to finish / drying my skin,” the speaker redirects attention from King David’s perspective, in which he sees a beautiful woman and decides he must sleep with her, and instead shifts the line of sight to Bathsheba, who was in the middle of her bath (lines 3-5). The shift is distinct; the poem is about what Bathsheba knows, not David or the narrator. I highlight her perspective by reaching into emotional complexities: “I met him while I was still married / wet with desire he thought / but really damp from the bath / and muddy from being alone for so long”
(lines 10-13). She examines David’s own perceptions and her reality challenges his. The moment becomes a conversation of perceptions instead of a direct narration. The expansion allows for a Cobb 7 plurality of voices that was not in the story before. The more voices in play, the more opportunities for everyone (including the feminine) to be heard.
Biblical women have power, as if clear from Bellis’s careful examination of each individual woman of the Hebrew Bible in her book Helpmates, Harlots and Heroes, but because their power does not serve the values and goals of modernity we do not explore it. Meyers writes that because interpretations, or “persistent male bias,” in interpretation exist, feminist readings of biblical literature—whether historical-critical, culturally cued, postmodern, or what have you— are necessary to reflect the realities of gender capabilities. The power of biblical women does not feed into our desire to “save” women who live in undeveloped society or exist as mothers and wives through economic development, Christianity, and Eurocentric democracy. This cultural fact made my personal exposure to feminist biblical scholarship nearly miraculous. Going through this scholarship after being raised on the stories of the Catholic Church is like hearing about the wonders of sex after thinking that babies were made by kissing. It’s not that I saw something in a new way, it’s more like I felt like I saw these women for the first time.
By examining creation as a process, I have followed the construction of womanhood as a narrative told in the American context. These biblical female figures became complex, social creatures through this new-to-me scholastic context. The women of the Bible discussed in these articles kill men with tent pegs for betraying their people, they save babies, they are leaders, they are prophets and reluctant lovers. So much of this power has been forgotten or lost in the stories we hear today. But the idea of powerful women at the beginning of Judeo-Christian time does not serve the power structure of our society. For example, when U.S. House Representative John
Shimkus refuted the need to acknowledge the impact of climate change by stating, “"I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God and I do believe that God said the Earth would not be Cobb 8 destroyed by a flood” (Samuelsohn). As Bellis writes, “what we accept as truth are the readings that resonate with our experiences” (17).
The power of female figures of the Hebrew Bible is overshadowed by the framework set up around them by masculine interpretations. Kate Millet writes that “both the primitive and the civilized worlds are male worlds, the ideas which shaped culture in regard to the female were also of male design.” But it is not this simple. This statement resigns the power of women within the Hebrew bible. It overshadows what the power of resistance women within the biblical text maintained. Millet goes on to say that, “under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described” (46). I want to combat this power shortage. I want to take charge of the symbols that describe me. I want to rewrite whatever portion of the system I can get my hands on.
The messiness of perspective in biblical scholarship allows for what would be an honest presentation of all stories: we must operate on the assumption that there are too many things we cannot know. Fiorenza writes, “one has to recognize that the rhetoric of writing history is always inspired by the quest for identity and enmeshed in power relations” (229). There is no objective truth to find in this process. In another essay, I would happily argue that there is no objective truth in any process. Truth is whatever place you live in; it is the view you hold. My assertion that Abishag is a character of power does not mean that she is not a victim. Bathsheba can both be in love with David and raped by him. Truth does not exist as a single line of facts.
The Rib Bridge includes a variety of perspectives on womanhood and identity construction. Still, my perspective, the unavoidable lens of my writing, is also incomplete. I hope to do as Mohanty suggests and make “no attempt to unify or equate the various struggles under a grand polemics of oppression” (100). My experience, the stories I’ve heard, they too are not the Cobb 9 whole picture. There are many parts of the world, and many experiences of womanhood that I do not know and have not come into contact with.
Choosing the Words
Pretending that the world of discovery is not centered on the exploration of ones self would be to turn a blind eye to reality. Bellis writes, “I agree with the new consensus that objectivity is a myth, to the extent that I acknowledge that it is impossible” (213). While I am attempting to distance my personal experiences from the research behind this project, I cannot completely divorce myself from it. As De Beauvoir observes, simply “the fact that I ask it is in itself significant” (Easthope 51). I necessarily carry my world behind my research. But there is value in presenting the quest for one’s own identity as heartfelt scholarship and art. This genuine expression allows for biases—that must always exist—to be spotted on the surface and dealt with as they come. I will be honest, this project is as much about growing myself as it is about growing scholarship and art. I use the discourse of outside voices (biblical women) to discuss the dynamics of power and my own privileged place in the hierarchy. I use a level of candid experience to show the quest for the identity that I know best: my own.
Through out the collection I record experiences that may be seen as taboo or shocking.
These discussions of sex and vaginas and penises and puberty and placentas might feel gratuitous. They may seem almost sensationalizing. It is important to note that I do not want to shock readers out of the stories I am telling. But I also want to share what I know. Cixous writes that “by censuring the body, breath and speech are censored at the same time” (Easthope 167). I don’t want to hide things because of discomfort. I do not want to talk about how many people
I’ve been romantic with. More though, I don’t want other women, frankly other people, to feel Cobb 10 that discomfort cannot be art. That it cannot be a part of their story. I don’t want to lose facets of my experience of womanhood to shyness or fear. There are the pieces that don’t always come out proud. There are perspectives I hold that I wouldn’t want to share with my gramie—and because of that fear, those are often the poems that most need writing. Again, Cixous calls out that women “must write herself because, when the time comes for her liberation, it is the invention of a new, insurgent writing that will allow her to put the breaks and indispensable changes into effect in her history” (Easthope 166). The pieces on biblical yeast infections, on the deep desire to fall in love while also thinking that it’s stupid, the “Wanting” where the speaker divulges their loneliness through public voyeurism and critique, or “The Morning After” where the speaker explores a relationship that feels good but is intellectually diminishing, even. Or especially, “Mr. Darcy,” where the speaker examines the way she superimposes victim blaming onto herself—these are the poems that most need to be put forward because they make me uncomfortable. Because they define my experience of womanhood. They are the writing of myself and to hide them is to lose a part of my formation. Often we are defined by our margins, so I feel that I must write about the outliers, the uncomfortable margins of who I am, the things I don’t always see, the things I don’t always want to feel. Those parts are the things that best communicate my experiences. Sometimes they are the most honest versions of myself. I am trying very hard to be brave about who I think I might be.
By writing from my own perspective I aim to create a dialogue for others who have had common experiences. I have chosen to call out to the anxieties and fears that other women, because of their social category within the U.S. context, might experience. It is important to care about the experiences of women because they belong to the wider category of Other. They are the Other to the Male I—Cixous asserts that woman are positioned within the power binary of Cobb 11 male/female that allows them to see parallel (and different) experiences of people living on the oppressed side of the binary. She writes, “woman admits there is an other” (Easthope 160). It is important to unravel the dynamics of gendered interactions in the past and the present because it gives the world insight in how power dynamics might operate for the proletariat, for the racial other, the sexual outsider, the child, the elderly, the handicapped. This binary power structure leave people constrained by the desires of a minority of privileged individuals. The means of these binaries within our society are upheld through violence. Millet notes that one of the most pervasive means of this violence is that, “it scarcely seems to require implementation” but when it does the violence is viewed as “ the product of individual deviance, confined to pathological or exceptional behavior” (43). My hope in sharing my stories—as well as the stories other women have shared about their daily struggles of being on the oppressed side of the binary—is that I will be able to record the banal violence of living as a underprivileged gender group (Easthope 53).
By making the embarrassing known, it becomes a part of our everyday vocabulary and breaks the silence on the violences we have been taught to carry alone. The lies we tell ourselves about what “women” look like creates a model for how to put other people down. It feeds into a system that normalizes violence and creates a gap between one person and the next (Cover 1601).
My choice to take this task on through poetry is a strategic one. Diane Seuss, while speaking casually with graduate writers at Ohio University said, “poetry has the capacity to get the closest to the questions without imposing an answer.” Poetry does not need to resolve or tie up at the end. Instead, it reflects and reconstructs our thought processes. I see poems as a way to record the process of becoming. They do not need to be anything economically useful, poems do not need to transform or build, even if I desperately hope that they do. Poetry takes the moment in and processes it. It thinks without a need for production. It lets the world breathe. It resists the Cobb 12 constraints of capitalist, violent, patriarchal values. (Unless, of course, you use it to graduate— but we all must work through some level of hypocrisy.)
Gathering the Biblical Information
The past is a moment in time—it is a series of narratives that exist only in how we retell them. It is critical to study feminist literature alongside the Hebrew Bible in order to understand how the story is being told. If, as Fiorenza suggests, the creation of history ought to operate more like the sewing of a quilt instead of the unraveling of thread and Meyer’s observation that
“[a]spects of current western sexual politics may be rooted in the Bible or its interpretive tradition but that does not mean they originate in the social realities of ancient Israel” holds true, then current scholarship and re-creation tales become a reflection of the questions our society is obsessed with and the beliefs we hold (7). The questions and assumptions that scholars ask of us and make about Ancient Israel are the questions and assumptions that scholars are concerned with in our current creation of culture.
Another approach of biblical scholarship is to look closely at the language of texts left behind. There exists in the examination of language the harnessing power of a well-informed close reading. Many, including biblical scholar Christine Mitchell, take up this text-based perspective. Mitchell proclaims that it is time “to return to a feminist-literary reading” while examining the story of women in the Hebrew Bible (1). She uses the Hebrew text and language analysis to determine that the words in front of her prove “[g]ender is an effect, not an essence”
(Mitchell 2). She uses critical reading skills to extrapolate that modern biblical scholars create value-based binaries that most likely did not exist in Ancient Israel. For example she returns to the original Hebrew to disprove the inferiority of women based on their position in the Cobb 13 dichotomy of man and woman. She writes that western thought relies on “the mind–body dichotomy” and assigns the male–female dichotomy as a parallel, with “the mind and the male in the privileged position” (Mitchell 4). She goes on to say that “the Hebrew Bible is not a product of Western thought, even as it profoundly influenced that thought.” She proves this by going through a series of binaries, such as silver and gold as word pairs in ancient Hebrew, to show that Ancient Israel does not place a hierarchy on these word patterns. This scholarship alters the intentions of the texts as they have often been interpreted and allows us to look at the
Hebrew Bible differently.
Eve Levavi Feinstein’s work approaches the text from a different perspective. Her method focuses more on themes and ideas. Feinstein follows themes of pollution and its assignment to gender. She outlines how pollution is determined by its cultural context. She asserts that this tells people “how to feel” (Feinstein 123). Scholarship like Feinstein’s examines the interplay between cultural context and the text composition. The thesis of her work states that in biblical interpretation “the male is the polluter and the female is the pollutee” (Feinstein 129).
I play with in the poem “Bathsheba.” She states that David, who has recently yanked her from her bath to please him sexually, thinks that she is “wet with desire,” but really she knows that she is “damp from the bath / and muddy from being alone for so long.” There is an unspoken understanding of self beneath David’s gaze. Bathsheba recognizes that her body is being repositioned and whirled into a means of pollution that David can escape, but she cannot.
While examining the politics of pollution, it became clear that subjectivity played a central role in biblical interpretation. Bellis creates an arena of acknowledged subjectivity to hold scholastic conversations about female characters in the Hebrew Bible in her book titled
Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes. She works to acknowledge that there is “not always a single Cobb 14 feminist reading of a biblical woman’s story” (Bellis 210). She also invests in the hermeneutics of storytelling. She comments that the preservation of texts in the Hebrew Bible occurs not
“primarily because they happened, or even because they were important expressions of faith, but because of the way they could be used to provide hope in [their] present” (Bellis 101). The main objective of the biblical text is not to accurately record the world as it is known, but to support an idea of a world in the author’s present. Her work opened up a world of theory to me. By examining the importance of social ideology in the creation of scholarship, Bellis encouraged me to examine the assumptions I was using to bolster my own writing.
Meyers writes that “[i]n linking causality to divine action, mythic etiologies function as sanctions for the present order, thereby enabling people to accept the conditions of their present”
(67). By stating this, she says—like Fiorenza, Millet, and Bellis—that origin stories hold power over the experience of the present. Explicitly she says that the “mana,” or creation stories, influence how current conditions control the narrative of social roles. While the implication is that this original narrative only works to explain the world to the “primitive” ancient population, it seems as if the fundamental understanding of women to the divine relies heavily on the same creation myths (Millet 53). Meyers opens the door to connect feminist readings of the Hebrew
Bible to the reconstruction of causality and divine. She writes that “[w]hen it comes to biblical studies, women along with gender and sexuality are not simple topics of academic concern […]
Feminist research is important because there is more at stake than just intellectual inquiry”
(Meyers 6). The allusive “more” mentioned above contains structures such as the legitimacy of female leadership and the “nature of the relationship between women and men in the informal setting of the home” (Meyers 6). The structure of today’s society is in many ways rooted in our understanding of the social ideal we construct from the Bible. Cobb 15
All perceptions aside, more often than not the biblical feminine is not an actor, but a setting. This is prevalent in the story of Dinah and Shechem, in which Dinah, Shechem, son to the ruler of an outsider group, rapes the daughter of Leah and Jacob. The rape is described as an outrage against Israel and Jacob’s house, not an act of violence onto Dinah. It is seen as an action against “communal boundaries,” not as a sin against God (Feinstein 131). Dinah’s body does not hold her essence or a reflection of God, but instead the essence of her father and her family line.
Her body is a container for all of Israel and when it is transgressed the act is against Israel, not
Dinah. The text describes women who do not exist as a subject, solid or liquid. Instead they are a container to hold man as the only subject, as the I. Women can invite, allow or be violated by men (solids) into their space, in which the men are held by the woman-container. By using the voices of women in the Old Testament, I aim to complicate women so they are no longer containers but subjects. In poems such as, “Dinah Gets a Yeast Infection,” “Bathsheba,” and
“Abishag,” the characters become conflicted conscious beings, not container for the stories of men to happen in.
Bellis writes that, “what we accept as truth are the readings that resonate with our experiences” (17). I attempt, in pieces such as “Mr. Darcy,” to capture an experience or a moment perhaps that other people have felt. I want to capture the teetering edge of trauma when the victim is not sure if something has truly happened and yet at the same time is sure that something has happened. In this piece, I take Bellis’s words to heart. I try to present a view I held to be examined by readers. However, I hope to take the interaction one step further than examination. This poem captures a moment of spiraling—an unhealthy thought process left to be examined to determine if it is as true as the speaker presents it to be. In “Mr. Darcy,” I ask the readers to examine their own truth. I ask them to make something else. Feinstein writes, Cobb 16
“pollution often looks to protect the divine, but sexual pollution is centered on human relationships” (127). “Mr. Darcy” takes a stab at the sexual pollution at play in this moment of interpretation for the speaker. The poem attempts to capture the insight behind the pollution. This poem aims to look at how the internal narrative of victims protects the divine of the assaulter.
The opening lines read, “I once made a mistake / that seemed like it would be alright / really alright, good even, I thought— / a mistake that when it was happening / was only, / could only, have been okay.” Here the speaker is discussing a self-constructed situation. As the piece goes on the reader uncovers that the speaker’s mistake is a sexual assault that was not rape, but she does not have other words for it that she finds believable among others. There are two separate moments of identification. The first is this introduction of the mistake created by the speaker and claimed by her alone. The second the reader finds at the end of the piece with the lines, “I wondered if I made a mistake / or he did. I wondered if mistakes / can be made like that,
/ if I made anything at all.” The speaker, while not putting a name on the interaction, decides that it is not a product of her own creation. She looks at it and wonders if she “made anything at all.”
The uncertainty of this piece is tantamount to its purpose. There is not a clear answer for the speaker. She says, “he did not rape me but […] it does not always feel that way.” The poem opens with the conviction that the speaker made a mistake, with certainty, because she can control that perspective. In the end the speaker is lost, she doesn’t know who “made” the
“mistake” or if it was a mistake or if anything was created at all. In the reality of her space, if she does not accept the blame then things stop making sense. She can’t sort these things out from one another. All she can do is to try “very hard / not to make anything else.”
By complicating the modern voices of women and the contemporary perceptions of readers, I intend to deepen the psychological life of the female characters in the Hebrew Bible as Cobb 17 well. Poems like “Mr. Darcy” train readers to look carefully at the experiences and thought processes created within the pressure of society. It asks readers to look beyond initial categories—such as rape or assault—and examine the psychological experience of having one’s identity boundaries transgressed. It asks for empathy. It asks for growth. It asks lots of questions there are no answers to.
There do not need to be answers, but there do need to be people to hear them asked. The poem “Ductility” brings forward the political force of listening. This politics of listening “can create an opportunity for the unheard and unrepresented to tell their story on their own terms”
(Bassel 53). Yet, it must be approached with honesty and awareness from those who are heard and are represented. “Ductility” looks closely at the bumps that crop up when people try to listen to victims of violence, specifically women. The speaker establishes herself as “me” and then separates this “me” from the ideal victim of violence, dubbed “you.” She defines the two in the lines which read, “when everyone starts talking / about violence they do not mean me. / They mean you—you imaginary creature / who always knows when / you’ve been hurt.” The speaker recognizes that while the story may be hers to tell, there is a difference in value between a woman speaking about a feeling of violation that is socially deemed inappropriate (society recognizes and accepts the woman’s pain) and a perception of violation that is not agreed on socially. The “you” woman is a product of the social myth of an ideal victim. She is attacked by a robber in a ski mask, the rapist in the bushes. The “me” of the speaker must twist her story into wire “to wear around my neck,” meaning her experiences are only visible when they are shaped the way the listener wants them to be. The speaker struggles with this, as she recognizes that she also participates in the production of this ideal victim. She defines herself as unworthy. Yes, the world may not ask her what violence she has felt, but also, she does not tell. “Ductility,” like Cobb 18
“Mr. Darcy” blurs the categories of good and bad, the perceptions of blame and innocence and tries to focus in on the production of meaning within a personal narrative. It is this internal conflict that allows the speaker to be more than a stock character with a pure heart, or a victim.
She is a woman in the middle of something.
I attempt to follow the conflict of existing through out this collection. While writing a poem like “Bodies,” I looked for a messy story to unfold from a variety of angles as feminist scholarship unfolds the stories of women in the Hebrew Bible. I attempted to capture the body through many lenses, using the perspective of the aunt of the speaker as she sees her daughter’s body. In this portion I write, “my aunt once said to me, / making bread while I sat / on the kitchen floor peeling apples, / she wished her daughter knew / the power her body has. The way men’s eyes / follow her. / I pulled a long thick strip of skin / through the peeler and held my breath” (Cobb). And I revisit the body again, writing, “My aunt once said to me, she wished she / knew the power her body had had— / Folded her hands deeper into the stick of wet dough— / the way men’s eyes followed her— / Flipped it over and poured more flour on top— / ‘Use it,’ she said, power does not come / around to everyone. It is what you do with it.” This time it is the aunt seeing her own body as it once was besides what it now is. The aunt tells the speaker what to do with her own body, how to shape it while the two of them shape pie dough and create food for others. The power of the moment comes from the layered unveiling of the bodies. The Aunt’s body, her daughter’s body, and the speaker’s body—they are uncovered in a series of steps like
Russian nesting dolls protecting a lost grain of truth. Or a lost grain of something that looks like them. Whatever it is they see as their core. The speaker later says, “and there have been moments
/ where I think that all I have is that power / so I have it and have it again. Apples and bread dough and / I become what I do with myself / or so I’ve been told.” Here the speaker looks at her Cobb 19 own body through the many different gazes that have been established in the poem—from her aunt to those who exploit her—to seeing a reflection of herself that she constructed from many people’s point of view. And then the speaker dismantles a small piece of the image by ending with the line, “or so I’ve been told.” Or perhaps, it is more accurate to say that she inserts a piece of her own perspective into the fray. The constant snapshot of a woman working and reflecting and building body after body. She finds herself trapped within the ideology of her life. The power society allows her to use is tainted with a feeling of weakness. The people she loves are trapped too. Her means of liberation comes from whatever freedom she can grant herself, from her recognition that these are things that she has simply been told.
I want my work to explore the way that women capture reflections of their bodies over and over, in the same way that I see the bodies of women captured through scholarship. There are many accounts of women fracturing their sense of self, a point Betty Friedan made over and over again in The Feminine Mystique. One young woman Friedan interviewed said, “I can’t see myself as being married and having children. It’s as if I wouldn’t have any personality myself.
My mother’s like a rock that’s been smoothed by the waves, like a void. She’s put so much into her family that there’s nothing left, and she resents us because she doesn’t get enough in return”
(Friedan 73). This seventeen year-old woman captures the loss of self that many elite women
(i.e. those who don’t have to worry about having clean water to drink, food to eat, and an indoor heated place to sleep every night) suffer as their identity revolves and fractures around the creation of others. This leaves such women as rocks that have been smoothed by the waves—a general nothingness without resistance. This is both a reality and a perception of womanhood. I want my writing to explore the perceptions of womanhood as they are cultivated around me. I want to capture the movement of the wave rushing over the stone. I want to express the feeling Cobb 20 of trapped repetition that womanhood, or perhaps life really, works over us. In the words of
Doreen Massey in her book, Space, Place, and Gender, “it is not simply final outcomes but processes of change which are significant to people’s experiences of their world” (127). I am interested in the process of becoming the smoothed-over stone, in the process of becoming the wave. I want to know how to undo both. I believe that poetry is well suited to record the inner workings of these creations because it does not get bogged down in a need to answer these questions, but can simply bring them to the forefront of the readers mind—which is important as there may not be any answers to find.
Writing the Words
When it comes to my writing—and all things—my mom often tells me to remember whose shoulders I’m standing on. Her words, as always, are powerful tools in my writing. I like to know who made the foundations I’m building on. One architect I rely on is Anne Sexton. The summer before my sophomore year of college, my Grandma bought me her complete works and
I sat anxiously turning pages on the outdoor break benches of the waterpark I worked at that summer, pouring over the words until they yellowed from the sun exposure. I was, and am, floored by Sexton’s careful construction of emotional maps. She attends to the emotions behind the feminine mystique vigilantly. She pursues the truth behind relationships that present surface perfections and peels apart the “American dream” woman are raised to dream. She was and is my foundation.
In pieces like “Expatriates,” a poem capturing the lulls and confusion of a relationship,
Sexton balances showing and telling delicately. She uses the scene to convey the things that the speaker is attempting to get across. She pulls the feeling of the speaker into a storyline by Cobb 21 negotiating a careful comparison between the moment she captures and the parallels in the speaker’s emotional situation. This tie between the physical and the internal solidifies the feelings of the speaker, lending them legitimacy that emotions, especially romantic or sexual emotions women have, often do not own. The first stanza of “Expatriates” is a direct address to the speaker’s “dear” (line 1). She writes, “My dear it was a moment / to clutch at for a moment / so that you may believe in it / and believing is the act of love, I think, / even in the telling, wherever it went” (lines 1-5). She tells her dear that what she is saying is important and full of love only if he believes her when she says it (assuming a historical gender for the ease of navigation, please read whatever gender identity you chose behind this he and she). Then she spends the rest of the poem writing her way into belief. She riddles her piece with phrases to destabilize the power of the scene she sets. The poem takes place in “the false New England forest” of foreign trees that refuse to root in the place they are planted (lines 6-9). She says that she and her dear held hands and walked on their knees through this forest and then follows it up with, “Actually, there was no one there” (line 11). She sets the relationship in a sea of falsehoods and non-belonging. She opens the following four stanzas with a version of the forest described above. She calls it an “experimental woodland,” an “ugly hill,” and delineates a forest she dreams. As the forest changes, so does the relationship until finally she breaks the scene and ends the poem with a telling bit. She writes about the relationship and the time in the woods in her final stanza, “My dear, it was a time, / butchered from time / that we must tell of quickly / before we lose the sound of our own / mouths calling, mine, mine, mine” (lines 30-34).
I looked to Sexton’s language and formatting of “Expatriates” in my own work,
“Murderer.” I struggle with writing about romance, especially the high school love social media mess I describe in “Murderer,” because so often these subjects are waved away as. In my Cobb 22 experience of the world, people dismiss young women talking about boyfriends and Facebook. I am worried about sounding like a whiny twenty something, soppy, romantic, girl. I am not proud of this fear, but it is real. So I too anchored my idea in a physical interaction with the world: the speaker hits a bird with her car. Tying the death of a living-breathing thing to the death of a relationship lends power to both experiences. Like Sexton, I use the sandwich method of opening and closing with the emotional puzzle that the speaker wants to convey to the reader.
And then, there is “The Farmer’s Wife.” This Sexton poem captured me and runs through my head once a week. The lines, “she will not say how there / must be more to living / than this brief bright bridge / of the raucous bed” drive me (lines 10-13). This poem captures a sense of loneliness in love that many of my speakers struggle with. “The Farmer’s Wife” is the account of a married woman trapped in love that her husband views only as “his habit” (line 7). Sexton traces down from the very beginning of their ten-year relationship into the speaker’s wish (and, according to the shift in point of view in which Sexton switches the speakers voice to directly address “my lover,” perhaps Sextons’ own wish) for her lover to turn some form of lonely beside her, whether cripple, poet, or dead. Sexton launches herself fully into the trap that love sometimes becomes. She delves into the suppression of wanting that keeps the speaker from having. In my own work, I try to respond to this suppression. Like Sexton, I want to put words around that loneliness. I use pieces like “Wanting” to point out holes and understand them.
While Sexton’s speaker wants “that old pantomime of love” of her husband’s touch, despite the distance it puts between them, or in Sexton’s words despite that having this, it still leaves her feeling lonely, “minds apart from him, living / her own self in her own words” (Sexton lines 16-
21). My speaker in “Wanting” sits outside of love and recalls her own pantomiming. She pulls from her memory, while watching two strangers act out love, an old lover. She recalls him as Cobb 23
“the closest I ever got / to holding the back of someone’s neck / but I didn’t really like him I just loved him / because I had to because gravity said I had to” (lines 29-32). Because Sexton already put words around this feeling of loneliness, my speaker is able to progress to name a desire for herself, the desire to “hold on to the back of someone’s neck / and care if they cried and to have someone / who would care if Granddad died again” (lines 36-38). Where Sexton’s speaker is still inside an unhappy love wishing endings onto her lover, my speaker is outside of trap-like love, looking for the thing that she knows she wants. Sexton provided an emotional foundation for
“Wanting.”
Sexton’s work captures the isolation that strict gender roles encourage. She discusses the role of womanhood through relationships, bodies, and surroundings—whatever she has on hand.
In “Woman With Girdle,” Sexton outlines the creation of women through the undressing and
“release” of a woman’s body from a girdle. The speaker of the poem’s struggle to remove her girdle becomes symbolic of the struggle of living in a woman’s body. The woman’s body becomes a battleground. The woman’s midriff “sags toward [her] knees,” her breasts “lie down in air” with nipples “as uninvolved as warm starfish” (lines 1-4). She creates the image of a woman’s body ravaged by the expectations of time and then let loose. By invoking the body parts of a woman, Sexton captures the focus and physical pains that come with expressing womanhood. In my piece titled “Relax,” I toy with this idea. My speaker watches her mother proudly list the stressors that cause her muscles to knot up as the speaker’s father attempts to massage out the mother’s neck. The mother/daughter pair build on one another. They carry their stress around like a medal.
In this piece, the woman’s body is again a battleground. “Relax” focuses on the way womanhood reacts to the male touch, as does Sexton’s “Woman With Girdle.” They both show Cobb 24 the gentle touch of men, yet reflect on the way that women have been trained to react, expect, anticipate, and prepare for this touch and gaze. The woman in the girdle’s hips are “head cushions / and mouth cushions,” and her vagina is called her “genius,” which her pubic hair covers from her “patron” (Sexton lines 13-17). The speaker in “Relax” builds tension behind her neck, waiting for someone to notice “how much harder it [the muscle] is than everything else they touch” (lines 12-13). Both pieces reflect the pain that can accompany constant awareness of who might be about to touch who. When one’s body is public domain in so many ways, when what other people do to one’s body is public domain in so many ways, one must be constantly best prepared to receive that touch, or they will lose their identity to the touch of others. They suffer the consequences of not knowing what forces are shaping them. These poems reflect on the burden of that constant, anxious, anticipation.
While Sexton’s work has influenced my content, other modern poets have had a powerful impact on my writing approach. For instance in Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones,” she speaks about powerful topics—the harshness of the world children, her children, grow up in—but she does not dwell deeply in this pain. She names it, she feels it, she laughs at it, she feels it, she keeps going. “Good Bones” explores the things that the speaker does not want her children to know, such as that “the world is at least / fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative / estimate” (Smith lines 5-7). The poem takes up the natural, delicious feel of being told something no one is meant to know. But the secret sharing does not overpower the reader. Smith strikes a balance between relaying a truth and recognizing the unknown. She achieves this through a series of mechanisms that I incorporate into my own work.
First, Smith uses low diction: the most daring word choice she uses is “delicious” and
“realtor”. The tone of the poem is chatty. She opens with the words “life is short”—a fairly Cobb 25 common phrase. She finishes the line with, “though I keep this from my children” (line 1).
Smith’s diction allows the words to seep into the reader’s mind, keeping them in on the joke: we all know life is short, the speaker cannot keep this from her children. The reader is engaged.
Smith continues on in this back-and-forth of accessible vocabulary and easy-going chattiness until the reader is swayed into comfort. They know it is a poem because of her use of repetition, but if not for that and the line breaks, lines 1-7 feel like they could be had over a cup of coffee or a well-trimmed hedge. Smith’s diction allows the reader to engage the poem as if the words were their own thoughts. Her diction is non-descript enough that anyone could be writing with the words she uses, though perhaps not quite the way she does. The reader’s focus instead directs to the structure of the writing (the repetition) and the construction of Smith’s ideas.
Which brings us directly to the next device Smith uses: the slow unveiling of her really good idea. The poem unfolds in layers. Smith begins by sharing how the world is a hard, bad, place to live in and how the speaker does not want her children to know this. The speaker begins first by saying that life is short. Then she inserts the comical relief of, “Life is short and I’ve shortened mine / in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, / a thousand delicious ill-advised ways / I’ll keep from my children” (lines 3-5). Smith uses humor to break down the reader’s defenses. They are laughing and vulnerable. This allows her to fall into the darkly comical series of statements that tell the reader the world is certainly at least half bad. I make use of humor in my writing to mimic this same effect. In “The Quiz,” I write, “I am pretty pretty and that should matter more, / scientifically speaking, than my pants size and / I really like to be the best or at least / the prettiest because that’s something.” I overlay this casual musing of beauty to cover that being the most beautiful is really something. It’s important to be beautiful but saying that is old and awful news. Better to soften it. Then, in the final five lines she gets down to business. Cobb 26
She paints herself as a realtor attempting to sell the world to her children like a “real shithole” of a house. She wants to tell her children the world has “good bones,” that they could make it beautiful if they wanted to. It is this idea, the thought of tricking her children in to missing enough of the bad the world has to offer that they can make it beautiful, that the speaker has been waiting to share. The dark humor of the piece cultivates the beauty of the revelation at the end: the speaker’s lie is not about shielding their children, but about leaving them enough hope to create something in a bleak place.
The third and final way that Smith strikes balance in her pieces through humorous candor—again something I try to make use of. The lines, “[f]or every loved child, [there is] a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake” (lines 9-10), alongside the lines, “the world is at least / fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative / estimate” (lines 5-7) capture a reality that is neither darker nor brighter than what it is. She does not attempt to hide bad things; she does not attempt to hide good. Yet she presents them in such an upfront matter that it stuns. The presentation of a loved child right next to a child being thrown into a lake is so unfamiliar it feels inappropriately humorous. Smith’s honesty and blatant representation makes the facts feel manageable, or so unmanageable that one could laugh at them.
The piece “The Morning After” uses similar devices to those that Smith displayed. The diction does not overwhelm readers. The piece works with speaking syntax—this piece too could be spoken over a hedge, though admittedly perhaps a less-pruned one. The diction and word structure allow the ideas of the poem to come forward in a concrete manner. The goal in this piece is to make the reader feel like they are thinking the thoughts of the speaker. This piece is written, like “Good Bones,” to drag the reader in and allow them to feel the thoughts of their own will. Cobb 27
“The Morning After” also unfolds in layers, the most important function coming at the very end. The poem begins with a description of a relationship, as Smith’s poem opens with a description of the brevity of life. “The Morning After” opens with the lines, “He calls me things I would not call myself— / princess baby angel dear” (Lines 1-2). Beginning with this line, the speaker establishes both that the world is not as they chose to order it, and that the order being inflicted may look positive from someone else’s perspective. There is a balance being struck between positivity and realism. The world is, yes, maybe fifty percent unable to cater to the speaker’s needs, but that same fifty percent has some awfully cute nicknames. The next portion unravels into a series of scenes between the speaker and the subject of the speaker’s affections.
First, a moment in the public space: the speaker and the subject are walking home at night. The subject states that he aims to protect the speaker, but the speaker does not want to be helped (a variation of the opening) and questions the vulnerability of the subject. The subject then tells the speaker that the world does not view him as vulnerable so their fear keeps him safe and in a position to protect. There is a back-and-forth between what is right, what is wrong, and what is actually happening. The language is simple which gives more room to the dramatic situation.
The third tool that Smith’s piece and “The Morning After” share is an effort for candor. I try to not dally around the unpleasant by denying it or reveling in it. I do not do this in the same capacity as Smith in “Good Bones.” Her poem slides through a series of things the speaker does not want to share with her children. “The Morning After” presents a series of thoughts that the speaker does not want to share with themself. Strangely, the secret-keeping presents an opportunity to be most honest with the reader. Readers already know that the speaker is speaking about secrets, what a better time to be honest than when you’re discussing a hidden truth? What would the speaker have to lose while conjecturing about a truth that will not be told? Most likely, Cobb 28 the speaker has quite a few things to lose, but the straightforward language and unfolding of thought/events in both pieces allows the reader to feel swaddled in an appearance (perhaps an honest one) of truth.
Man and Woman, He Created Them
In conclusion, I want to tell a different story about how women came to be. I needed the past twenty-something pages to tell you that when I do this, it’s not replacing the story you may have already been told. I’m adding the things I’ve learned. I’m putting my discomfort into a format of some vague art for you to leaf through. Look at the pieces and the parts and decide what, if anything, it means to be a woman in this world. Look at the perspectives and the women
I try to sketch out and determine what true it is that you will take away. Cobb 29
Becoming Woman
Cobb 30
Eve on the Subject of Original Sin
There was a snake in the garden, yes but there was also fruit. And I would like to mention that there was no evil—no bad or good. There were only God’s words and the fruit on the trees. People often forget that.
And sure, we were naked but our temptation belonged there. It did not tell us who to be.
Yes, I ate the Goddamned thing and, frankly, wisdom tastes like shit. If you want to judge the choices I made, then here, let me ask you a question: would you rather be like God or obey him?
As a matter of fact, fine, I was the one who made the decision not some scaled-thing-snake-body act of anyone else but me. And I’d do it again. I’d rather find God in myself than wait for his favor.
So I can forgive the blame and the corner market on the pain God given to all mothers, sure, but this is the shit that always gets me: My dear being, pulled from my own side (or perhaps I from his) was there when the snake spoke and he ate the fruit from his own hands.
Either he made a grownup goddamn decision or forgot to turn on his ears. There are your options. Protect his honor or protect your own because he knew and he ate and that’s his own sin.
And another thing about wisdom: you can’t go back to who you were Cobb 31 once you start becoming. Knowing changes you, caresses you into being what you weren’t before. Innocence, I think they called it.
Still when I sunk teeth into that small round bite of beyond, when the lump fell limp and wet on my tongue, I knew what I’ve always known: we’d have to keep going.
Cobb 32
Things to Let Go of (A Midmorning Prayer)
The idea that I’m impenetrable, the idea that everyone is trying to penetrate me, sexual puns, laughing at double entendres, bringing attention to when people say but (butt)/ duty (doody)/ do, do (doodoo), laying down in public spaces, sleeping on the ground, walking around barefoot in ice-cream parlors, taking off my shoes when walking home, the need to be protected, the need to protect, the need to physically hurt anyone who upsets my sweet baby sister, referring to men who break hearts with good reasons as cunts/cunty/shit-dicks/fat, believing that it is okay to be as late as I please, not calling dad back, drinking caffeine until I want to murder everyone instead of listening, God, my fear of God, the terror of being known, the terror of being unknown (bonus points to pick just one), believing that all twenty-minute walks are really fifteen, waiting to know who I am before I tell anyone, the urge to save the world, boys I once loved—Jacob, Tyler, David, Mikey, Steven, Jordan, Chris, Danny, Cory, Mehdee, Jonah, Noah, Phil, Zach, William, Josh, Aaron, Adam, Taylor, Andy, Brett, Dan, Max, Isaac, John, Mathew, Matt, Jack, Scott, Clay, Brendan— who I thought my mom was, what I thought I’d be, escapist day dreams, any thought that begins with it’s not fair, believing that things are fair.
Cobb 33
The Quiz
Here are the things that have been said to me today:
One: my sister, littlest tiniest itty bitty baby I remember but eighteen and mean and smarter than I am, says to me, “Just because you feel something doesn’t mean it matters.” Me—breathless confused because of how true it sounds but still wanting to be in love with the bad bad unlovable idea of loving someone I shouldn’t.
Two: a quiz I took online, emotionally actually on the line, pulled up from Pinterest, because Facebook was stressing me out, like big time, with things about the human I love that I can’t talk about—Yes, a quiz to find out how rare my personality is, because I love to feel rare, and the test I took previously, about how scientifically beautiful I am, told me I’m pretty but like top 30% pretty not like top five, so I feel a little damaged and not quite trusting, because I think that if I was well, two, maybe three, dress sizes smaller I could have been at least top 14% because I am pretty pretty and that should matter more, scientifically speaking, than my pants size and I really like to be the best or at least the prettiest because that’s something.
So I take the quiz to learn something about myself or to learn what I know I want to be told (I’m rare and pretty, or pretty rare, or rarely pretty (wait)), and I get going and feel pretty great about how cool I am and I watch the ad to get my results because at this point I’m into it, deep, and there it is, the thing that I get told (this is too much build up): “It is time you learned how to treat yourself more like a friend than a project.”
Okay good advice, I guess, I mean I really guess, because it takes my breath away and I continue to sit in my roommate’s Cobb 34 recliner chair and breathe and close out windows on my laptop and think about all the ways to work on not working on myself. And I feel rare, but very alone.
So I try to double down on forgiving myself but instead I remember that my roommate is sad and my friend’s brother died and I haven’t called dad in two weeks and I keep having stress dreams about my high school ex-boyfriend’s laundry detergent smell and my face is breaking out because I stopped moisturizing and I decided to eat three pieces of pizza when I wasn’t hungry and I drank too much cheap whiskey with weirdos and called my ex-lover on the way to my lover’s house and I’m mad about it because that’s a lot to give up on fixing, you know? And that’s only my two-minute list, I’ve got a journal of unchecked boxes boiling over behind me and a second notebook in my bag, I’ve got mountains and molehills around the same height and just because I feel like letting go doesn’t mean it means anything, Right, Sophie, sister, right?
Cobb 35
Life Lessons
Here are the things I’ve heard in my mind in my soft heart head space: I’m meant to be a basketed baby because my hands are soft because I chose soft after I peeled off the few good callouses I had after the blisters I peeled because babies have soft hands and that’s me because babies are loved and hung by the breeze that rock-a-bye bullhokey bubble of beyonds and buttercups and I’ve always had an affinity for yellow does that mean I am sunshine a bright ray on the breeze can the wind carry me like the sunlight is that what the wind was winding me into? Who will take me beyond the boughs breaking and the cradle falling and how will I get there if the wind won’t bring me back?
Here are the things I know: when I speak softly people like me. I have used my words with my eyes I have hugged people into submission subsumed them with thank you notes and dinner invitations if I do not yell if I say “I think, maybe” there is no pull away if I nod my head when men talk to me they don’t see me and I can do what I want and I mean all men I mean the men with vaginas the men who feed babies from their breasts I mean the masculine because that’s what I’ve learned to bow to yes bow to what bows does not always break but boughs do bend too far and drop babies on their heads. Cobb 36
Climbing
You would remember it as falling out of a tree the small one in your backyard—crabapple—blossoming— split, at the base of the trunk, into two sides. One side you climbed up and sat at like a desk, firmly situated in the saddle of the lower branch legs thrown through the gap and elbows leaned so hard on the tree limb in front of you that you would kiss the trunk on your way down. The other side you mostly did not climb, though once you did. You scattered yourself between the leaves and crawled up bit by bit pressing your feet firmly against the opposite side, scooting your back up the unfamiliar trunk, pressed so hard against it that the flesh of your thighs scraped off in a slow fricitive peel. You knew the skin must be left behind or you would fall. It burned later in the shower when you tried to wash the sweat out of it. It made you feel rough and good and tired until then.
When you reached the stable part of the side you never climbed you swung your weight over its edge, holding onto the tree by only the stub of a dead branch wrapped up in your pinky— The stub will break and you will fall. You fall.
The ground stamps the air out of your lungs like its wringing out a sponge. You can’t feel your pinky. You lay on the ground, lungs all sponged out. Chest crushed. Body stunned.
Later, much later, you realize that this is the feeling of space being taken up. In the moment you only realize how far away the sky, later, much later, you realize that this is the consequence of taking up space of not allowing space to take up you. In the moment you only realize how slow the air is to return to your body.
You keep climbing until the trunks are too small and the top not high enough— Then you find a new tree. You don’t ever fall out of this one. At least, you think, you try.
Cobb 37
Sleeves
There is a man in the bible who asks God, “will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?”
He rages against the unfairness God brought down. And I really want to get that sense of active rage because lately living feels like putting on a show— a jumpsuit, maybe. polyester or pleather depending on the day. There are yellow feathers, a neckline plunging to my navel, other times wool turtleneck grey from chin to toe—but always I feel it wrapped all the way around me maybe riding up a little too high in the crotch, pulling my shoulders forward and down.
I’ve been trying to put more fabric around my knees.
Living feels like a thing I put on and perform in. Living feels a lot like a show.
I suppose we are all being watched by the gods of our frontal lobes, as we swallow our spittle and put on our new clothes.
I know it’s true because there are all these words in my mouth all these thoughts in my head waiting to be seen. Or maybe watched? Is that any different? Either way I feel a little less true for it. A little more like everyone else.
I understand the urge to tell God to look away. Those words have fallen in fruity drips from my lips. But I have been feeling like I don’t know what Cobb 38
I’d be if everyone looked away. So I’ve decided: what I put on is my truth, I guess. I suppose God’ll see it or won’t.
Cobb 39
The Mystique
Betty Freidan says that “ideas are not like instincts.” Betty says, “American women no longer know who they are.”
So I’ve burnt all of the poems I wrote asking “who am I?” because I never sat well with becoming what mother was. I never sat well with being what I am— little bundle of dread sat very shaky still.
Really, I do not sit still, very often, though I was once very good at it, silent at the ballets— the most statuesque third grader they ever had singing, “hide my light under a bushel, no” —so still in the front row. I was blessed with a bad voice and the ability to freeze. The means to pretend I was not there. Do not be distracted by the girl, see how still she is? How still. They preferred to see me they told me I could just sing real quiet. Really they didn’t tell me. I knew. I already knew how to stand perfectly, how to not move.
Yeah, Betty has seen a thing or two, hasn’t she? And I suppose I’ve seen a thing too, and we know what sitting might do. So I’ve been shuffling all day I’ve been moving all night I have not slept in three weeks and I want to know, am I a good woman now?
Cobb 40
Bar Talk
She said something that hurt me I’m sure of it. I’ve been drinking but only three drinks. I drank fast. The bartender said, “it’s only because it’s slow in the summer. We’ll keep the goddamn doors open as long as there are people inside” and I was inside in the city but was I? Was I? Or was I on a bike on a street at a bar in a town? Was I sitting drinking alone because mother told me not to? Perhaps. Alone is the most intoxicating part of that sentence
I swear it is like sugar but sweeter because it never turns you down and only sometimes makes you fat. Simple sugars like alcohol or strawberries. Flirting to feel it, for the fuck of it, for the control because what did I eat today? What did I swallow? What was lost to me while I was losing?
I kept count because I was counting on things until I could feel the world wrap up around me, my does that feel good, knowing that nobody here will ask questions I have to answer. They can only make noises that envelope me, envelope me, lick the stamp and send me away crying like Thomas Pynchon. And, yes, that reference was for me because easy, easy, I’m lost and perhaps postal, posted, pasted to this bar stool waiting for music or some tool to come up to me and try not to talk about my boobs because I have them, hilarious, Cobb 41 hideous among friends fiends, short dead ends—when she said it, I felt an icy burn and all of the sudden I started noticing the rings on men’s fingers as they served me and it all felt a little less real. Realizing nothing revolves around me. Regardless of how many revolutions I’ve seen myself make— I’m still a child trying to end things without finishing them. He called me Kid and threw a bottle opener down in front of me—promotional. Perhaps, we’re friends.
I dream this way—solitary, sitting in the bar I’ve been in before, bed lorn, betting on myself because I feel sorry for poor little lonely house me—and then I remember what she said—“we’re all one moment away from becoming the broken woman in front of us.”
So be kind. Cobb 42
Mothers
Cobb 43
Salt Pillars
Every time I leave my mother I expect it to set me free. It does—leaves me loose like leaves off trees, floating, left to the breeze.
Mother may I memorize the veins on the back of your legs? The way they pull from the muscle and puncture your skin, how they wrangle the freckles of your calves?
I didn’t see you look back, but I’m sure it was beautiful as the sweat harden, the sand like soil like it was growing you from your salt-pillar feet.
I remembered how you used to use your hands to pull out a cup of flour from the bag, scrap off the excess with your palm. The feel of flour like silk sliding skin as the flour flew from you your cup, my hands— waiting patiently in the bowl.
I visit you a few days a week to ask you how I can love you, make bread, and still be my own.
Cobb 44
Babies
My sister and I were sitting on a cement balcony when she asked, “have I told you about my mommy complex?” and I said, “no.” So we talked about it.
I said, “I feel like I can’t be a grown-up without being a mom.” She nodded her head.
I said, “it’s the first time in my life I feel okay about not having babies.” She shook her head no. She wanted them.
Our worlds kept revolving.
I asked, “Do you ever feel like it stopped her from growing, having us so young?”
“Oh god yes,” she said.
So we thought about mom after the house burnt down scrubbing the ashes out of our American girl dolls until her hands bled.
We thought about all the clothes she threw away to scrub Kit Kittredge’s cloth body torso clean. We wondered what it is she no longer wears.
We thought about mom losing her dreams in the tangles of our hair and all the places she wanted us to know. I wondered, alone, what dreams were supposed to look like because
Cobb 45
I have dreamed of holding a pile of soft baby curls in my hands.
When I dream it, I imagine the thing as my own. I imagine it to bits— fat arms and thick legs, the most mine mine has ever been. I want to fall in love like that, with the soft skin in my arms. But I also want to live. Cobb 46
Relax
My father sometimes comes up behind my mother kneading his hands into her shoulders deep down into the muscles behind her neck and says, “You’ve got the biggest knots I’ve ever felt” and she glows and says something about stress and pain and birthing three girls and raising a classroom every year and cooking casseroles he never notices and sleeping with dogs on her head and cats on her face and waking up at four a.m. and wondering where we are, where are the girls, where are they?
And I watch. I let each muscle behind my neck build up, so that someone will notice how much harder it is than everything else they touch.
Cobb 47
A Few Questions
I could feel him through the floor while I was downstairs putting away dishes and calling home to figure out how on earth soup gets made— I could feel him studying. And while I was calling mom and talking about vegetable bouillon, I felt an irritable push, which makes me ask, what was it that he was reading. Plato? Thoreau? Some sort of haughty Emerson shit?
Which makes me ask, what was he getting out of those minutes, those few half-hours, while I was making soup? I would have vegetables but so would he because I would share the soup with him. that is the right thing to do.
Which makes me ask, is that the right thing to do? or should I remind him of the wage gap and passive discrimination like when there’s not a single woman on the wall of the hallowed hallways we both walk through at this hallowed academy.
Which makes me ask, instead of giving him soup should I be giving him all the reasons he gets it better or better be getting it? Because I swear that I’ve put away dishes thirty times this week. I swear I’ve put away dishes a thousand times this week. And if I come home to the dishes I put in the machine to open the machine and get puffed up with dirty now clean dish steam, I will freak.
Which makes me ask, do I just not know how to ask him kindly to shut the hell up when he tells me that I can’t make pancakes with the amount of oil I have in the pan? Am I just bad at asking someone else to do something? Which makes me ask, did I just not try hard enough? Did I not look him dead in the eye and say, “hey man, hey, um, I think it’s Cobb 48 your turn to put away the hand towels?”
Which makes me ask, has he ever asked me to put away dishes or make soup? Has he ever felt the need to set up an “I think that maybe you might have” sort of sentence and wrap it around me like a blanket that could straightjacket pull me into what he wanted.
Which makes me ask, how often do I wrap people up in my words and try to guide them into doing what I want? When did that become cool and normal?
Which makes me ask, where did I learn that from? And I answer that one because there’s about a million different answers to that question and they’re all correct. And I’ve chosen them because I called home today and they told me who I was, which was nice because it was a long day and that’s a big burden to figure out if you want to do it responsibly and sometimes you just need someone to tell you. And all of it just made me ask, is this about me?
Which makes me ask, is this a boy girl thing or a me him thing? Is it our mothers? Was my mother better at telling me how the world thought I should be? Was she better at doing dishes and making soup and was his mother bad at it? Or was she the best at it and so good that he never even had to enter a kitchen because she superwoman-suppressed every bit of laze and had dishes put away and dinner done and went out and did her homework so fast he didn’t even know that it was in the doing? Or maybe both our mothers were so good at their jobs that we were molded into our own happy doings that were meant to be done by us, so said our mothers and theirs.
Which makes me ask, why am I asking about mothers? Is it their fault how we all ended up meant to be? Did my mom fail and make me into a soup maker Cobb 49 instead of a studier? Or did she succeed? Did his mom make him into a butthead thoughtless soup stealer non-dish doer? Or did she succeed?
Which makes me ask, is he just a better student than me? Am I just bad at it, undedicated and uninterested in working hard enough to get through without good vegetables and soft beds and clean clothes?
Which makes me ask, has he ever asked himself any of these questions?
But by then the soup was finished and there were more important things to do.
Cobb 50
Tomatoes
Two dead ends— dead head, popping the withered away marigold blooms with four fingers and one thumb.
We played in the garden when the tomato plants grew. We watched as the marigolds bloomed.
I dig—a small hole, enough to release the smell of dirt and I don’t think of the tomatoes prickly and sweet on my tongue.
Instead I think of crying. “Two years ago I was a daughter” mother says to me and we cry.
“Two years ago I was a granddaughter” mother says to me and I cry.
I was these things once too.
I dig holes and the dirt reminds me of Once Upon a Time when we sat in the garden and her earth was mine.
Cobb 51
Heaven
A better being than me once said, “there’s not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him”
And it’s not really that womanhood is wrong for me it’s more that it doesn’t always fall beneath the canopy of heaven. It’s that the sky forgets me and lets things freeze up without the grace of god or the blaze of the sun.
And yes, I agree, not all women are slaves or even, really, the same, but how many of us learned that femininity is not right? That the taste of womanhood is meant to sour on other people’s tongues?
What if slavery is not always the whipped back or body on the stand stripped naked not always fingers probing molars, not babies sold from my breast but the dirty dishes and the babies clinging to me in every word Gramie says. What if slavery is the men who watch my ass and ask me how much I weigh as I serve them food, as they sit calmly across the table from their hungry wives.
Not the slavery of skin but the trap of my body.
Slavery, not the kind that keeps me from learning letters but the kind that keeps me from telling stories because women do not speak that way and people talk. People talk very carefully about what women say. And mother has always told me that people will know what I do that they will tell their mothers and if
I do bad if I do wild if I do anything different they will stand between me and what I want.
Cobb 52
Instead of learning to fight I learned to love the things that servitude could make happen, I learned to ask, can slavery really be wrong for me? Didn’t it build the pyramids and pack my lunch?
The world as I know it let me forget that mother mostly had me pack for myself and I’ve never been to Egypt.
Still slavery, like the voice in my head that says I’m not a slave, slavery like the voice in my head that sounds like you, saying I’m over reaching that I’m only as stuck as I say I am saying this is the world that everyone lives in that I am my own hell the voice in my head that sounds like yours saying these poems are not important and my thoughts are all the same.
That voice. It sounds like yours but if it’s in my head— if its in my head, isn’t it my own?
Cobb 53
Chondra
“a history of mistreatment causes women to enter prostitution, while lack of financial resources and knowledge about lives outside of prostitution keep them from leaving” —Katherine A. Cascio
I was told I could find her riding the handle bars of his bike down on I-10 by Loyola Avenue.
When I knew her her whole body shook, a pulse of forward motion and then back, quaking the last bits of whatever was in her system—uppers, downers, arounders—out.
She told me, tears in her eyes, cigarette in hand, uneasy on the brick steps, that her son had taken the pitbull when she was on the streets. And when I came back on Tuesday to see her again, she was already gone.
When I think of her now I imagine the wind in her hair a smile on her face, her hands still as the world moves around her. When I think of her now I think of the man pushing the pedals, deciding how her wind blows. Cobb 54
What I Know of India
Sacchi’s mother set herself on fire the same year Meeta graduated from law school.
What did the air smell like flesh or gasoline?
Sacchi told me in hypotheticals and long walks across her India ground, that her mother was dead. There was no talk of fire, just of fathers and wild dogs. She did not stay for dinner when our talk was done.
Meeta told us the truth— casually, in the middle of a chat— to the secret I thought I knew over European chocolates and our American hands crossed neatly on each pair of air-conditioned knees. And none of us breathed the air.
Cobb 55
Abishag
When King David like king king, biblical ruler of it all, got really far too old he called a pubescent girl to his bed. “Bring me Abishag—” or something like that he said.
Don’t worry, they didn’t do it, I’m sure he was too old, couldn’t even dream of getting it up. Mostly was talk about getting warm. And Abishag was too young, I imagine, to know how to try or to know that she had to try to be more than a warm naked girl in a King’s bed.
Too young to know that when a King calls you like that, the whole wide world is calling on you to try—
No he did not put his penis inside of baby Abishag, he just royally fucked her, left her womb without a hint of baby boy breath. Unpregnant, nothing to stop the next man from calling her in. and laying there, body bared heat seeping into the sleeping stranger beside her, she learned how to sing inside her head, how to count a hundred thousand sheep, how to lie just still enough that everyone thinks you’re nothing but asleep. And she learned how to keep her own heat.
Cobb 56
Romance
Cobb 57
Dinah Gets a Yeast Infection
It began with a burning sensation, like fruit ripening between my legs all the things I thought of him like hot sticking upsetting watermelon out on the table too long. Warm sunshine bad fruit caught between my thighs.
It began with remembering how he stroked between what had become froth burning cottage cheese, soupy warm itchy burny— could I love him without it?
It began when I tried to remember the moment, her body curved into the sea as his curved to me, but it ended with the feel of my body melting around the heat between my legs. It was not a good heat, though I loved it.
It may have begun with his eyes looking at me from across the floor. We were both sitting on the ground and he refused every bite of bread I offered though I knew he knew I knew he was hungry. He did not stop looking at me once and I felt my body swell with his stare.
Perhaps it began with me. Sitting on the front step reading a book about a talking ape which I hated. It began after I began exploring and then still after I had stopped exploring so I could sit on the ground in the sun and forget about any hope for desire and that’s where I ran into him three hours later. On that same stoop with my eyes closed and an ape in my hands. Cobb 58
Wherever it started the lips of my vagina are red cherry tomatoes hot hot hot and everything about my vulva is swollen thick like meat. I love him but I did not think of that when the inside of my body pushed out ooze like tubered worms.
I thought he had tried to kill me to burn me out of my own body and I wondered if he knew what he had introduced inside of me. It burned a little fire flames licking and laughing and I did not call him for three days until I could remember if my body was my own.
Cobb 59
The Morning After
“Everyone is telling her to be careful” —The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
He calls me things I would not call myself— princess baby angel dear
He calls me things I would not call anyone else and he walks me home when it’s dark. He is worried about me walking alone I told him I have strong shoulders. I told him I like him enough to walk by his side. He says that no one is looking to hurt him. He says that other people cross the street when they see him walking alone and I worry for him all the way home.
I know I love him because the word princess makes me cringe but not ill when he says it. I know I love him because I’ve said it enough times. Everyone is telling me to take very good care of myself I’ve been telling me to take very good care of myself. Love is not what I’m afraid of but neither is walking home in the dark. Still, in both places, he is beside me.
We were playing. We were drinking. I told him he was wonderful. He told me he wasn’t. I told him if he didn’t say he was wonderful I would pick his nose. He told me I wouldn’t dare. I told him I was gross. I reached to his nostril. I cupped the rim with the tip of my finger. He said he wouldn’t let me. He pulled my arms all the way above my head. He said he wouldn’t let me. He wrapped his legs around mine. He said he wouldn’t let me. He put his shoulder into mine. He said he wouldn’t let me. He put his elbows into mine.
There was a moment that he didn’t see, because he was playing And I wasn’t. I wasn’t loosening my hold so he could feel stronger than me. Cobb 60
I was not trying to be playful or flirty. There was a moment when he was stronger than I was and I couldn’t move. It didn’t matter that I wanted to be there it mattered that the matter wasn’t up to me. I felt beyond what I was I had no option—he was on me.
I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. Baby, how bad it hurt to have to know that.
Cobb 61
Murderer
This week I blocked my ex-boyfriend on Facebook, Instagram, and my phone. I forgot to unfollow him on twitter so he blocked me there and I knew he knew I didn’t want to know him anymore, which was a strange relief— knowing we could communicate through aggressive non-communication, if you know how important that is—which I’m sure you do because you’ve been broken-up before or at least hit a bird while driving and felt so much distress that you pulled into the nature preserve across the street from your ex-boyfriend’s ex-house and parked your car so you could walk up to the place in the road where the bird lay dead dead dead and you picked up the little tiny thing, thinking, “I killed this but I did not murder it,” and you did not question how much your ‘but’ negated everything before (how far back do buts go? (I know what I did there)), so you swaddled it in the leftover McDonalds napkins you had incase of accidental spills or apparently accidental hit-and-mourns.
You very carefully balanced the napkin-wrapped birdbody, the Purell, and the windshield scraper you grabbed on a whim to dig the hole, and you took the bird to the tree on the far side of the road where it was flying, you supposed, when you hit it in the middle of the love song you were blasting, while you were feeling great good brand new about how fast you shifted past his ex-house and kept going without flipping it off—so unlike the weird ex-lover brokenhearted part of you.
You found that you could not bear to bury the tiny thing with the feather stuck between its hardly open open beak. So you set it down, soft, from the napkin by the base of the tree and you walked back to your parked car chanting to yourself that the bird dying was worse than you killing it.
All that is to say, you’ve tried to bury something before, successful or not, Cobb 62 so, you probably understand what I mean when I say it’s important to communicate without saying anything, to communicate by letting things die or hitting them with your car, so to speak. Cobb 63
Growing up
Sometimes I imagine me through his eyes so I can see myself a little more clearly and be unafraid. forgetting that he wore thick glasses my dog once chewed to pieces and was always acting afraid of me. forgetting that I am not meant to see myself all the time. Forgetting most of the other things he made me feel like I ought to have known.
I try not to see anything at all when I close my eyes. and I don’t tell him my stories—rehearsing alone in the bathroom mirror— when I can avoid it.
Cobb 64
Bathroom Stall Love Poem (An Attempt)
You’ve read one of these I’m sure in a literature class or on the side of a bathroom stall about my story, maybe ours, a tiny one, the bit I can’t hold inside because frankly, it’s achy, and I love to press those little sore parts, those loose gums around my teeth (that’s not good) still I would rather not feel all of it all the time, only when poking, so I’ve got a bathroom stall love poem for you because I got tired trying to carve the thing into a tree. Because writing the story in the sky did nothing. Because I want you to know this mid-shit, I need you to know this while you’re alone.
See there was a gentle gentle holding but firm and bold without bolding and I cried until there was snot on me and on him and in my hair and so much in my mouth that I couldn’t kiss him right though I kept trying. And then there was the moment. One of those moments where I know for a fact that there is magic in the world and the magic is sad. It has an ache. It has sat, the magic, in an empty field and wondered before.
Yeah, he looked at me, really so kind, and it wasn’t a moment so much as a million moments and it wasn’t a million moments so much as it was him, saying, “can I still be in love with you?” And me, telling him he could. And me, knowing I wasn’t sure I would let him.
Cobb 65
Wanting
This afternoon this boy came lumbering into the coffee shop and made eye contact with the girl sitting four tables down from me and walked over to her. He looked so upset. They whispered something between themselves and she reached up and put her hand on the crook of his arm, the inside of his elbow, he looked like he was going to cry, so she reached up with her other arm and put her hand around the back of his neck and held it there, pulling so he knew she was there, like gravity, and I thought about my sister when I called her and told her Granddad was dead in the middle of her week and she had to stay in town until she was done and she was alone but he wasn’t alone he was with the girl and I could only see her hand and her long hair and I looked away because it was so intimate and I wouldn’t want anyone to watch me and it felt wrong to watch a man almost cry after hoping he would because his lumbering irked me and I didn’t like how good they both looked long shiny hair and big grown-up man shoulders.
I thought about an old sweetheartbeauflame because he was the closest I ever got to holding the back of someone’s neck but I didn’t really like him I just loved him because I had to because gravity said I had to and I felt an ache that wasn’t for profile pictures or baby powder smells or strange hickies I pretended to hide from my high school friends but hold on to the back of someone’s neck and care if they cried and to have someone who would care if Granddad died again.
Cobb 66
Keeping Covered
I was sitting in the bathtub waiting for things to come together and water to warm up my toes and I thought about you, Chris Ryman. I started writing this poem inside of my head instead of wondering if you loved me.
Yesterday I decided to shave my legs because I’ve been making political statements with my body hair but they’ve mostly been private and my mom could see the hair on my legs and it itched when I lay down or looked at it in the shower so I shaved my legs and my armpits. I left my vagina because that felt high school to shave and it itched and I learned that part of my body had a name. Having a name makes a difference when you don’t know it. Saying a name makes a difference when you don’t have it.
So I was shaving my legs with a razor I found in the shower at home and I pulled it up the inside of my ankle and it vacuumed in a slice of my skin while it was still living and the skin under it pulsed with a longing to be covered by what covered it before. I pulled the sliver of ankle skin out from in between the blades and it seemed strong until it broke in half. I was bleeding so much I wondered if a shark would smell my blood through the drain and that was scary enough I didn’t imagine what the shark would do if it got me, I just imagined it coming out of the drain. My ankle throbbed and first I thought “ow” and second I thought, of all the terrible things in the world hurting people all I did was cut my ankle.
And today after working with you Chris Ryman, after you passed behind me with your chest to my back while I was cleaning off the iced tea maker, wiping down the little spigots that sprayed hot water on to the oversized teabags and dripped into the metal container until it’s too full to finish and I have to carry it to dish at the end of my shift with my elbows sticking out awkwardly, slopping unsweetened tea all over my body, onto my shoes, today after you passed behind me so close I could feel the heat from your chest while you made sure to say my name, after I saw you I drove to my friend’s house in the snow and I crawled on her carpeted floor until I felt the prickle of Kindergarten sweat—from nothing but wiggles and body moving and hands sore from the monkey bars, a good good tired— and I left when I didn’t feel loved anymore.
Your smile is sweet Chris Ryman, like a boy who sweat for the first time in the nervousness Cobb 67 of armpits and doubt, a boy who never knew the burning pleasure of the kind of drip that covers your muscles after chasing boys and climbing trees and not evening having to believe yourself because you just exist. I love your curly hair, I love that it’s brown Chris Ryman.
You said my name and took every single pie spatula when I emptied the basket full of them, one by one into your hands and you laughed like you’d like to hold me to your lips and giggle—but we kissed, with my tongue in your mouth and my teeth over your lips and you told me later you liked someone else.
And you still laugh at my jokes like I’m biting your lip and it makes me feel crazy Chris Ryman, like I’ve been grabbing onto your industrial backroom grill with both my hands and squeezing just to see what happens.
You burned me Chris Ryman and my mom even knew about it because she made Sophie be nice to me the day you told me and of all the terrible things happening in the world I thought, all you did was hurt me Chris Ryman and blood drains away.
Cobb 68
True Love
When granddad died gramie said she would never go to Florida again where all they had to do was love each other and bike to the other side of the island to buy fresh oranges maybe close the hurricane shutters when storms came.
I think that even if we dragged her bones over every state between us and there, even if we exiled her to the beach to live off sea salt and beach glass she would never be there again.
Cobb 69
Numbers
If we’re counting kissers then it’s been what, maybe, twenty-seven? Thirty-six? A number I know actually, each inscribed in a black book— faux leather bound and presented to me as a birthday gift from my dad— which I used first to notch their names into my hypothetical bed post, and then to remember who they were. I wrote in my blue fountain pen, a system of circles, stars, lines, and hearts to describe how far we went.
Phil got his name lined in, and oh! six months later a star. I circled him casually, once, maybe twice, in his room. I read Sophocles afterward while he watched me, almost on the ground so far from him and the mattress of his bed. Alex, a boy and his tattoo, wow I would have thrown a rectangle around that ass, ahem, him—if you know what I mean. But he was too worried that I never had before so I left him with a star, left myself a burning feeling with every arm tattoo. Boy #1 of the worst night of my life got a star, but I wish he hadn’t. He pushed into it as I was sitting on the counter at a party, reaching through the holes my thighs had rubbed into my jeans. Boy #2 of the worst night of my life was only a noun and a number, written without a will or a dream. David was a star with a heart, and though I always thought I would circle him, I’m glad I didn’t. Jordan, well, he’s why the lines got a little more cursive, cuter really, why gel pens came into play. Really, now that hurts to say. Ethan got a star, line, and maybe a heart, but he doesn’t know that yet, so keep your mouth shut. Cobb 70
And Jeremy got a star I wouldn’t have given if I’d had less to drink. A circle if he could have.
Tell me for a moment what your gut said when you read all that.
Tell me again what kinds of feminist you’ve been.
Emotionally protective post-script: If you think I’m easy, you can go circle yourself.
Cobb 71
Violence
Cobb 72
Delilah Speaks About What She Didn’t Know Before
When I feel alone, I hear myself wondering if I loved him completely would it have been different? The way he pulled my hair, the look of his smile. If his eyes hadn’t caught me pinned me with his eyes in every room. I don’t know if I would have done it.
Even with all the locks of his hair tangled between us I knew there were worse things holding our bodies together. I could feel the strength of God in his touch.
I know now that God does not only touch good things.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love me, about all of that I’m unsure, it was that his hands didn’t know how—couldn’t do anything more than grip, grip matches pull down buildings tear out every strand of my hair— He never learned to hold things together.
And I had nothing that could teach him.
Cobb 73
Violence
When the man asked the woman on Jerry Springer if she deserved it she said, “does anybody?” And Jerry Springer offered to kick his ass.
There are a million ways to shadow shame into a person, but they all involve hands. A threat, a tingle, a promise that one day a touch will come and you will deserve it.
That is what it means to live a life of fear. Or, at least, that’s what I will say when I am not afraid.
Cobb 74
Pimps
Her gums were loose enough that they had to pull six teeth.
The four back ones and two in the front.
The dentists could not let the teeth fall out on their own— each had to be yanked, and new stubs implanted.
When he hit her he didn’t do it hard enough to make her teeth fall out. When he hit her he did it just often enough that her gums receded until they could no longer support the bone.
Skin pulled tight against tooth, exposing more with each blow until her gums were so low that he could not touch them.
It did not, however, recede far enough. Instead each tooth had to be pulled, one by one. There were too many to do at once.
When she told me I mostly spent the time wondering if I could make it matter to me whether they were her teeth or my own. Cobb 75
More Space
I’ve been opening doors a lot lately I’ve been opening a lot of doors and getting angry when people walk through them. Metaphor extended, I don’t want company. I stayed home and did my laundry watched Pocahontas and ate the last of the egg casserole from the freezer.
I do not feel strongly about doors they are just doors, but feet? they are not just feet. And people? damnit they are not just bodies what a shame.
Because all week that’s what I’ve tried to be, just a body or maybe it was a door— I can’t keep things straight.
No guests I said! Please, don’t come in.
I know I was clear, I saw you hear me through the doorframe and in case you didn’t know, an open door is not an invitation, it is only an open door. Though, I suppose it is a metaphor for our own space— that’s what it stands for, separating my space from yours. Do you see it? There I worked it out. And when you leave, would you mind closing the door?
Cobb 76
Bodies
There are only so many turtlenecks I can wear only so many doors I can leave cracked half open. An apple is what you do with it, my body is what you do with it.
My aunt once said to me— making bread while I sat peeling apples on the kitchen floor— she wished her daughter knew the power her body has. The way men’s eyes follow her.
I pulled a long thick strip of skin through the peeler and held my breath.
My aunt once said to me that she wished she knew the power her body had had— Folded her hands deeper into the stick of wet dough— the way men’s eyes followed her— Flipped it over and poured more flour on top— “Use it,” she said, power does not come around to everyone. It is what you do with it.
Let it rise. Remember to push the apple slices down on top.
I could use it or I could wear turtlenecks and leave the doors cracked—which I do because the power of my breasts does not take me to the places I want to go or it does but I can’t stay there or it does but I have too-much-not-enough privacy with all these closed doors and exposed collar bones and there have been moments where I think that all I have is that power so I have it and have it again. Apples and bread dough and
I become what I do with myself or so I’ve been told.
Cobb 77
Mr. Darcy
I once made a mistake that seemed like it would be alright really alright, good even, I thought— a mistake that when it was happening was only, could only, have been okay. Great, really, because it was a thing I thought about a time or two.
But then the mistake ran into me and he was sweating, not dripping, but definitely glazed, in an army green cut-off and I had the word compassionate pinned to my chest because I was asked to write, in huge confident letters, a single word that best described me in the meeting I had just left.
I waved and made eye contact and didn’t remember the word pinned to my shirt because I could almost feel the pit fall in my stomach, or my stomach bottom out into a pit, or whatever— I knew, in my underground animal self, that the drop was coming.
I was caught up in all my wondering if maybe I had made a promise or a come on or a dream that I was dreaming out loud and in the open so I couldn’t take it back (could I?) I was worried because I asked him to come to my home (did I?) I led him into my room I told him about the paintings on my wall (he asked.) I drove him to his house and it was my body that got up and sat on his couch (he asked.) wondering what had I done? (did I do something?) It was me. I did it. I did. (Did I?).
And can I even be mad at someone for not saying no Cobb 78 when I asked? (I am). he called me beautiful at one point, at a different one, and I thought I would like it, but didn’t.
He said was glad I was talking— a body with words written all over it— glad that I was not alcohol in skin. He thought for sure, for sure, I was too drunk. He told me this, after it was done.
He did not rape me but I don’t know what other words can scare you enough to believe me. I don’t know what else to say. “He did not rape me, but—” says the word compassion from my chest—“it does not always feel that way.”
So when I finished waving I unpinned the word from my chest, ferociously, and remembered to smile as the cars let me pass in the pedestrian walk way. I took myself as far away as I could be from where I was before. I took myself to the closest newest bathroom to cling to the windowsill until my head did not threaten to slosh into the pit. I burped twice and did not throw up.
I wondered if I made a mistake or he did. I wondered if mistakes can be made like that, if I made anything at all. To be safe I tried very hard not to make anything else.
Cobb 79
Mr. Darcy Speaks
I saw her at the bar, after she saw me that woman thing who yelled my name into the crowd, shouted out to my back, waited for me to be around. She caught me as I turned toward her. So we walked to the stairway and I desperately tried to remember her name her name her breasts her young thing body. She fell a little, here, to the side and looked me dead in the eye. Do you remember me? She asked, and I knew she wanted all the ways I knew her to come out of me. She asked me with that yell, with those slow footsteps to the stairway, she asked me to show her all the ways she could be, all the things she already was inside my head: her legs splayed her hair in my fist her breasts underneath me. She asked me right then—leaning hard against my chest to hold herself up—to show her everything I already knew about her. So we went home. So I told her. And now she knows.
Cobb 80
Ductility
The experiences of women (I feel uncomfortable saying this) are measured by their malleability— how fast can you smash them into foil, wrap them around the top of a half eaten casserole pan? Or maybe it’s more about reshaping, no that more difficult word, when metal is made into wire—what is that?
Which is to say, when everyone starts talking about violence they do not mean me. They mean you—you imaginary creature who always knows when you’ve been hurt. You, you are a bronze already cast by their hands. You, you are the thing we tell you to be, and we (me and me and me) follow behind you, wishing— Me, my memories must be wire to wear around my neck. Look how they draw out my collarbones, do you see this stone?
And really it’s all unfair, because all the me’s I’ve ever known have had to ask what’s been shaping them. They’ve always needed to know if their pain is believable.
And I’m talking about women who do not ask people to tell them who they are. I’m talking about women who jump into water without fear. Women who have always known how to swim.
Or known it until they feel that feeling in their stomach. Do you know the one? The sweating and hot and about to die of cold waiting to be put back together by mother but—do not let her touch—because if anyone touches the skin then all of it all of it will go until we drown once or twice long enough that there is salt in every wound and half of each lung feeling. It is the feeling of metal being Cobb 81 shaped closer and closer around the neck.
All of which is to explain that I know I’ve been a little quieter or louder or meaner than I meant to be. That I left you not a lot of choices and you walked away with out asking, what’s been inside you lately? who’s gone too far?
Because it’s a fair question to walk away without asking, which is why I need to tell you that I’ve been metal so wrapped around those stones so turned in on myself— so choker tight on what I meant to be and it would have been different if you had known to ask me what happened. it would have been different if I had remembered to tell you. Cobb 82
Bathsheba
I met him while my hair was still wet towel recently dropped. He saw me bathing on the roof and did not wait for me to finish drying my skin. I met him with dirt between my toes grit beneath my nails from the forced dirt street march of me to him.
I met him while I was still married wet with desire he thought but really damp from the bath and muddy from being alone for so long.
I met him while I was lost, confused, soap bubbles in my hair. He pulled off my bathrobe so tantalizing and slow. He pulled off his robe not at all. It was just me dripping shampoo down the royal bed in tendrils of hair. That’s what love was like for me.
Cobb 83
Work Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozie. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED. July. 2009. Lecture
Bassel, Leah. The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life.
Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017.
Bellis, Alice Ogden. Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible.
Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
Cover, Robert M. (1986). “Violence and the word.” Yale Law Journal 95:1601-1629
Easthope, Antony, and Kate McGowan, editors. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Open
University Press, 2009.
Feinstein, Eve Levavi. Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: A New Perspective. Oxford
University Press, 2014.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W.W. Norton, 1963.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Polity Press, 1994.
Meyers, Carol. Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. Oxford University
Press, 2012.
Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. University of Illinois Press, 1969.
Mitchell, Christine. “Coming, Going, and Knowing: Reading Sex and Embodiment in Hebrew
Narrative.” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, Volume 5, Number 2, June 2016, pp. 94-
111(18)
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity. Duke University Press, 2003.
Samuelsohn, Darren. “Shimkus Cites Genesis on Climate.” Politico, 10 Nov. 2010.
Accessed April 5th, 2018. Cobb 84
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton. Mariner Books, 1999.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. “Re-Visiting Christian Origins: In Memory of Her Revisited.”
Christian Beginnings: Worship, Belief and Society, edited by Kieran O’Mahony, London
Continuum International, 2003, pp. 225-50.
Smith, Maggie. “Good Bones.” Poetry Foundation. Web. April. 2018