By Christine Hamm
I haven’t been able to eat, again, today. My stomach refuses to be a part of me. A poet killed herself near this park, last year or the year before. When my blood pressure bottoms out, I am a horse of a different color, colored like cool porcelain, like a spring hat.
It is always winter here. This man-made lake in a park laid flat, filled with the harsh sound of geese, ducklings’ murmurs. The poet once wrote about swimming and wanting to die. Every time I circle this water, I remember her lines.
After the bomb became light in my train: a ringing silence. Darkness in that tunnel, a vibration in my ears, and the soft plop of the woman sitting next to me, her blood covering my hands with a certain rhythm.* My heart rate, even now, is low.
The winter sun whitish, the clouds like moistened gauze. The mystery of my diagnosis. A man traps my shadow with his hands, even now. There must be a word for the horror of this lack, in some book, under another woman’s tongue. In my pocket, the animal of my phone shivers. I pretend I cannot feel.
Title is a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem, “The Jailer”
*Part of this poem refers to my experience of the bombing in Italy in 1984
Christine E. Hamm (she/her), queer & disabled English Professor, social worker and student of Ecopoetics, has a PhD in English, and lives in New Jersey. She recently won the Tenth Gate prize from Word Works for her manuscript, Gorilla. She has had work featured in North American Review, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly and many others. She has published six chapbooks, and several books — hybrid texts as well as poetry. In all her work she explores trauma, the body, and consciousness.
losing our grip on purpose 