Land of altered bodies
In the summer of 2016 we met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. As poets with physical disabilities, we immediately found much in common and quickly became friends. In the months that followed, we talked and wrote frequently to each other about our lives, our bodies and our experiences of being in the world. As our friendship evolved, it naturally gave rise to work; we began writing together — first, a set of essays in conversation, which were published last year, and eventually a book titled In the Field Between Us, a collaborative collection of poems.
Those poems, three of which are published here, detail our experiences with disability and medical intervention, and the subsequent grief and isolation that such intervention creates. The project began as a series of letters between us, designed to give voice to anxieties we had once experienced alone and that, until our friendship, had gone largely unspoken. We hope that in their current form, the poems convey the buoyancy of two voices in dialogue and allow the reader an entry point into a deeply specific experience with universal resonances. (The full collection will be published by Persea Books in 2020.)
The book begins with a letter from S that details this speaker’s dream about the possible loss of her legs, an imaginary space wherein she feels finally free of the heft and weight of the years of surgery, bodily alteration and physical disability. The second speaker, M, replies with an invitation to delve into that shared psychic space. Thus begins a series of letters that situates the speakers in relationship to each other and enacts their shared struggle to locate a stable sense of self.
Dear M —
The dream where I’m legless isn’t a nightmare, and I’m not afraid — there’s light and a river and everything is exactly how I’d hoped. I’m not tethered to the earth. I’m not tied down by gravity, dragging my legs along the bank gravel, not searching for the softest patch of moss.
I’m not even tired, and though I’m certain the dream is an elegy, it sounds exactly like a praise song. In the dream my legs break free of me and I watch them float away. The coffin in my chest blows open in the wind, and for once I think I know what it’s like to be without all our dead and heavy things. Dear S —
I’ve said this all before and anyway, you had already been picked up, held down, put under, and refashioned; you were already dreaming your body in some gravity-less country, already calling it a river, Mars. Let’s go back to wherever it is we were made for first: to water, or a rusted windswept planet where everything floats and women are part horse or fox, knocked off kilter and galloping left to get where they were meant to go. We’d miss it here eventually. The boat that brought us, I believe in it. But having found you
I am seeking out the channel where we came from.
Sister, take my hand?
Dear M —
What we leave down in the canyon — the stain of us — red on red, hemoglobin on hematite, the trace of us the one true map we’ll ever leave. Hidden out of sight, a place only forgotten animals tread, we’re pinned to rock in outline and sketch, the idea of us a puzzle no one’s yet seen or read. Unclasped by bodies and their weight, we start again, we take another shape, we learn our worth by learning what we’re not, like new animals or children who, finding themselves wingless, still test the air and fall.
As the sequence develops, a collective, imagined landscape begins to take shape: The speakers find themselves caught between the desire to be at home in spaces that aren’t made for them and a desire to be lost among the wild, uncultivated landscapes — woods, rivers, canyons and fields — that more readily resemble their untamable bodies. A central paradox emerges: How can a body that can’t return to its natural form, since it has been irrevocably altered by the violence of surgery, ever be at home in the natural world? And if it can’t go home, how can an imagined home be fashioned from what resources remain?