Arch of Hysteria, and: Certified, and: Belief, and: Ars Poetica, and: Seeing the Body

Arch of Hysteria

I have been through hell and back and let me tell you it was wonderful.

—Louise Bourgeois

I want my web to hold. I want to repairwhat I have made. I was not given the gold hive.In me seethes the silk of invisible worlds. Spinningmy body inside of hairline emptiness, I projectmy unwoven path. Dangle above the filamentsof what feels weightless. In some dawn my lifeglows mud or bone or sorrow. It is whateveryou think can carry you from your childhoodwithout breaking your heart. There's a prayerthat matters to the girl, to the mother, to all ofmy daughters who are at work. The wind blows usagainst each day. We birth a word or silence.We snap threads impatiently with our teeth.Solitude is a skull inside of our childrenwho don't remember what it took for usto free ourselves. Wingless & certain, we fly.I am gone by the time you find a trace ofme. The gift of my eight legs spread intricatelyfrom post to beam to corner. Look at me hangingin the shadow of your fear. My artbrushing against your lonely face. My little clockbehind your brooms & ghosts. Your cells,upon closer inspection, resemble my descendants.Cast me into love or flames but do not leave mealone in your house. It will only take usminutes to haunt the body you haveorphaned. Pray that I am making my wayout of the hysterical socket of your eyewhere you once held mein horror. We can crawl togetheralong the awful trip wire of my hunger.At the center of what I have doneto feed myself, my children.

There is no title. There is no title. The body is content. The body is window. The body is container, curtain, chair, grid. Do you see? Bones & shoulders, a spine guiding the breath I can't force to change what is real or unreal. Is it mine? Only air

surrounding form—

a curated perception that troubles. My mother's death flattening against the wall. I can't see my own face now—

the photograph ever now—However the repetition of memory—

I can't see my own faceas I hold myself.

Certified

We had to present proof for everything:My mother was bornAugust 31,1954. On that dayinside the womb of a minuteshe burst from another woman's life,gasping her first breath of lightin some now demolished roomat DC General Hospital,which no longer exists in the extraordinary waysmy mother no longer exists. She was swaddled.Shit & mucus (I first typed music)wiped away from her small brown face.Her story, gossamer almost unobserved,streamed like a tender, moonlit kitefrom a spider's belly. Inside her I waswaiting. My mother went to school.Fainted in class from allegiance & hunger.Walked, like so many other black girls,to class with cardboard for the soles of her shoes.Fought rats in the cupboard at home for white bread.Her family's living room furniture on the sidewalk.Her mother dead at thirty-sixfrom cervical cancer. Which makes the velvetsack of red silk & clots weary in me. My future.My mother got her GED. Decades latershe'd have a college diploma. Over the yearsshe gave paper her paranoia, her respect, her grudges.Whatever was written was law. Made history liable.Lied. Then paper wrapped around her body,around her organs. Her medical files could filla room, a mansion. Insurance & charts. X-rays.Letters from specialists. The results of teststhat would judge her impossible future Impossible.So many referrals. So many prescriptions.It was another language. A loosening hammockof alphabets & symbols provoked her night & day. Insomniaat her heels like the claws of a leopard. Spotted& quickly at her throat before she could swallow. Each diagnosis sustained a lie that...