A freewrite born of this beautifully visceral prompt offered by Laurie Wagner of 27 Powers.
Laurie takes a "wild writing" approach to sitting down at the page. Needless to say, this resonates. I also love the idea of using poems as prompts--of bathing ourselves in someone else's words before we take up our own. It's deeply connective, and awakens new parts of our voice.
The prompt is from the poem "If they chop open my body," by Julia Alter.
If they chop open my body, they would find a mycelium version of me. A toadstool song of tulips, like the ones he brought me for Valentine's Day and said they were from the kids. They would find lists upon lists of things undone. And desires. And shoulds. And an entire lungfull of shouldn'ts. Above my diaphram, and possibly also below, they'd find the remnants of slow mornings and tumultuous nights. Events that trace the fibers of my muscle brain like fascia wrapped in stone.
If they chop open my body, those little thoughts tucked into silent corners might finally be set free. Like gremlins. Or blueprints manifested. Traces of poetry and waning slivers of moon. Thoughts erased and then born again. Thoughts I've moved on from. Thoughts too difficult to bear.
If they chop open my body, I might just be ready to do the work of piecing it all back together again. To come to the table of joy and drink, fully this time, with gulping breaths between. And I might just reexamine my skin, in an inside-out kind of way that I haven't tried on yet. And like it. Stories rewritten in sinew and song.
If they chop open my body, a tapestry would unfurl. A threadbare mosaic of eelgrass and cardboard playhouse windows, and the shag carpet from our house on Edenwood Drive. They'd find my grandfather's smile and my mother's way of blaming herself for everything. They'd find the Abram's river tide, flowing in and out like a heartbeat, and a barred owl feather just beneath my knee. They'd find hairy caterpillars in my ribcage and karma in my teeth. Annual flowers and perennial dreams. And wild things, and grasses, and weeds that show us what persistence looks like.
And connective tissue between.
I later took a line from this freewrite and turned it into a poem called "nightfall," which, like me, is still a work in progress.
Thanks for reading.
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