Daughter, I won’t make milk for you anymore.
The body retreats. It reclaims
miracles.
Published in Glint Literary Journal.
Categories
Reabsorption Elegy
Tag: motherhood poetry
My poem published at Tupelo Quarterly.
“the skate-floor-turned-dance-
for-your-life-floor,
just beginning to understand
I was the reason
for her dizziness and egglonging”
–Jenn Givhan
Categories
Miscarriage
Jennifer Givhan
Miscarriag
e
In a field where a hot air balloon waits tethered,
children balancing umbrellas and wearing party hats
plant birthday bouquets; where they grow
the swollen bulbs push open the soil
smelling of clay and fingerpaint. Even the sky
celebrates in reverse, hanging like pigtails from a jungle gym.
Not many daffodils or crickets are lucky enough to become fossils,
but here every joule of heat remains inside the balloon.
One might be tempted to drift away now
rather than later.
2. Looking Glass
The image in the mirror appears whole
though I swear I am a fragment.
Columnar self,
I am my own grotesque other body.
I fell asleep inside my pod and woke to red,
where oceans are dry as salt flats, where red means lost
and lost means dead.
(Read the whole poem here, published at The Fertile Source).
I am so honored to have poems & an interview published by The Fertile Source:
“In the Looking Glass section, with its body-as-empty-house imagery, I thought in terms of Mexican art—surrealist paintings, specifically by female painters Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, and Leonora Carrington, play a major role in my writing. They infuse my imagery with color, with discovering beauty and hope in the grotesque, in the strange. The columnar self is also an allusion to Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Broken Column”—and the grotesque is in part referencing the grotesque aspects of this type of art. I also draw on Julia Kristeva’s formulations of the abject in this section. Kristeva writes, “Abjection is above all ambiguity… while releasing a hold, it does not cut off the subject from what threatens it” (Powers of Horror). What threatens the infertile woman (and the woman whose babies die inside her) is her own body. Refiguring the classic construction of the mind/body split was a major concern in this section. In the poem, I was working out my own formulation for such questions as, how does a woman love a body that hurts her? That sabotages her? How does a mother find/express/nurture the babies that exist in her mind and heart but that will not grow inside her body?”
(Please read the whole interview here).
All my best to you,
Jenn