Assignment 2:2 poem to my uterus Lucille Clifton
you uterus you have been patient as a sock while i have slippered into you my dead and living children now they want to cut you out stocking i will not need where i am going where am i going old girl without you uterus my bloody print my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire where can i go barefoot without you where can you go without me
My friend Riley jokingly calls her body her “meat suit”. The imagery is graphic and morbidly suiting for the giggly, dimpled girl that crafted it. My father is a chef, and before the mid 2000s, when he began teaching his art, I grew up inside of a restaurant. The last two times I’ve had my heart broken it was because someone was moving away–most recently, the one moving away smoked cigarettes, and thus smelled like my late Grandma Jean. We squirmed in bed saying goodbye, trying to differentiate physical orientation from state of mind. Once I pooped my pants while on a run.
I’ve spent a significant amount of my life trying to understand where exactly I am situated in my body. I’d like to think of this skin as a meat suit I could peel off, tone, shave, whatever; but I have difficulty distinguishing the skeleton that it sticks to, that is to say, I almost never feel things in my bones. More often than not, my sense of self and sense of place are convoluted by my chemicals and physical bulk. The physical space one takes up can be daunting. I’m still working to understand what of my being I am in control of, and what is stubborn, unchanging, a physical constant. I feel like a lot of people devote their life(style) to disassociating state of mind from physical existence, transcending the barriers of the body. This is a powerful thing to do, and in so many situations, rejecting the traditional limits of the body is vital to growth and well being. But for me, in the discussion of home, I can’t help but to acknowledge my physical existence as significant to my sense of place.
I’m going to borrow the themes in Clifton’s poem, stretching them from what I see as her intended message, to discuss the significance of physical self in relation to notions of home. you have been patient as a sock. I tend to feel emotions extremely physically. I’m that kid who pukes when they are stressed out. Crying is one of my favourite things. I also like going for runs after nights out. I like the way I cough and spit and physically come to terms with everything I’ve consumed and done. My body is patient and forgiving, and in realizing this, I slowly become the same.
While is incredibly cathartic to use physical motion to come to terms with the emotional self, understanding and accepting the limits of the physical self is just as much as a process. All of the chemicals and synapses that feed into my emotional sense of existence, all of the stubborn bits that prevent me from functioning and identifying with myself are what make separation of physical self and emotional self challenging and perhaps impossible. There is this sense of urgency when your chemicals exhaust you. When you cannot rationalize your state of being. When your emotions feel primordial to your identity, that you are experiencing this essentialism that you aren’t really in control of. My body has been patient as I’ve tried to transcend it in my definition of self. As I’ve travelled and moved and changed places unknowingly lugging myself–my meat suit–around.
I’ve travelled a decent amount for the number of years I’ve been alive. For a long time (including the present), I (have) put a huge amount of energy into associating with place. Into becoming physically rooted to a city or geography. This notion of geographical space and Canadian identity has been discussed in our class before, and is especially vital to notions of colonialism and land. I do not wish to identify as someone who has shared the First Nations experience(s) of colonialism, but I would like to connect my reliance on physicality to connection to place to the use of physical geography to define home.
where can I go/barefoot/without you/where can you go/without me. Lugging my body to new places has exhausted me into accepting this idea that home is most often a cumulation of experiences rather than a physical location. The title of Chamberlin’s book, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, speaks to the transformation of geographical location into home. When Chamberlin talks about displacement, as European colonizers as also homeless, he brings to question the different layers of displacement and disassociation of place and self. I fear that it is impossible for me to not indulge in this cliche, this idea that home is a feeling, a memory; that people who love you make up your place. But it is true that you can’t just seek your stories elsewhere. That home is comprised of histories and melded into this pseudo-physicality that cannot be denied. This is not to say that home cannot be and is not being constantly recreated, but it is also saying that one’s physical self, the home that one carries around, is always interacting with the homes of others.
I have this baby tooth, rotting away in my mouth. There is no adult tooth underneath, and so there is nothing to push it out. But 21 years with a vice for gatorade power means that this baby tooth is riddled with cavities. I was eating sushi and part of it chipped off. I bailed on my last dentist appointment so this half tooth is just kind of sitting there. I’m trying to think if I have any cells in my body older than this tooth. I’m trying to think what will happen to my jawbone if I just leave it there, rotting.
Works Cited
Clifton, Lucille. “poem to my uterus.” Quilting Poems. Brooklyn, NY: BOA Editions. 1991.
Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: AA. Knopf. 2003. Print.