Anarcha: J. Marion Sims Opens My Body for the Thirty-First Time, and: 1973: My Mother Cleaves Herself in Two, and: Late That Summer, and: Theodore Bilbo Attends My Sickbed

Anarcha: J. Marion Sims Opens My Body for the Thirty-First Time

Montgomery, Alabama 1845–1849

I am not yet dead. Do not call this miracle or raise your hands in praise. First, you should know how long I prayed, and how I came to know the silence of the Lord.

He does not arrive in a ball of light blinding on the road to Damascus. He comes in silence. Lie there night after night and you will come to know

He speaks in the tongue of suffering. I have survived; do not call it brave. I rattled this body from the inside. I could not find its latch. I would have escaped it

if I could. Reader—a body can be rummaged through like a medicine cabinet. The flesh can be unfurled. Stitched, unbound, mended and stitched again.

Nothing is lost; nothing can be unmade.

Do not underestimate how hard it is to die and do not think the dead will save you. The dead have forgotten suffering. Remember what I told you.

Remember how hard I prayed. Remember: whole days and nights I wandered outside myself. My body opened to wind and latched again

like a door against it. There was pain in the opening and pain in the parts that healed. Remember what I said of prayer: to house the soul in a body is a way of it.

Sometimes we suffer for one another as I have suffered for you. If you like, we can call it holy.

1973: My Mother Cleaves Herself in Two

I am born. I dream the nightroom of your body, and in that place, you sing, build me of words,

tell me the story of the locust: how she does not know herself except in the presence of another. She will split

herself in two, shear the thorax, cast off the shell of herself and consume what-she-was as afterbirth so that she may live.

Locusts reveal themselves one to another to yet another like this, crowding the horizon—slick, black, gleaming

from prose to plague. You sing me there in your gloaming. There, in your nighthouse, you knit me of words. I am born.

Your voice. It is sweet and filled with longing. I rise from the inside, from the inside to the outside as if to say, I hear you. I am listening.

Late That Summer

That summer night, we gathered again around the table, drinking with all the bugs that lit up and some that didn’t. When Mike said: I wonder how my ex-wife is doing,

we looked down at our phones which glowed like all those fireflies, and we looked up old loves. Except me. I remembered I crossed a city in winter once,

scaled a steep snowy stair to a man farther from me than distance. He could not love me. Not then. The betrayal, he said, is just too much. Then he

closed that door and latched it resolutely. Anyway. One woman found her ex married again; he held a child in a picture captioned: This is the best

it’s ever been. She bent her head and wept. One shouted: Look, look. Look how fat she is, but even so something crossed his face like weather.

The woman in the picture was smiling as if she swallowed some joy so great it could split the skin. Oh look, I said, see how happy they are without us.

The wind was cool and soft, and insects drawn to fire fell into hot wax never to escape. I thought on that in long days after. I’ve thought on it a good long time.

Theodore Bilbo Attends My Sickbed

When the ache was just too much, I’d skip down the hill to the slip where you and a small boat were always waiting.

There, we would draw out the sloop into the glassy-eyed river and sit for hours...