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Monica Mody
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Red
Since hesitations and breaches in my written speech mark the shrapnel: places in my fundamental skin that beckon love, touch, cleaning, cooing, surgery. The red tears; red, torn skin calls out for a story, remembering, healing. ¶ In another way, every time I write, the impulse to write has moved on / I am trailing the old impulse, its tail reminding me of origins and remnants, the archaic and the archetypal, while the mouth of snake is ready to swallow me. Mouth of snake suckles me as I close my eyes, ready to faint. What keeps me awake is this delirium: poison that slowly like treacle through my veins transforms into a mass, a movement, living tissue, breath and blood. When I rendered myself to her, I knew this was it: this surrender. We don’t talk of what must be eliminated. The rectal. I eliminate the poison of fear every time I let a word, single letter or five, drop. But letters contain in them a warning: remember, remember. I don’t always remember. Perhaps this is nothing a child does not know, but in maturity, trees standing in their windboughs learn to turn away. The longing is too deep. We cannot fall into longing where to cry is forbidden: paralyses of one kind or the other. ¶ In the beginning of time, a poet lived with her family. The family loved and cossetted her, kept her away from housework and farmwork and roadwork, kept her away from duck ponds and glo moats and train yards. She with letters dancing before her eyes. She with letters festooned on bedposts, she with her skin laid out on the bed. In the beginning of time, the poet knew not where to go but paid attention to the call of time. Time called and sang winds to her and she sobbed until time could curl her in its large fingers like a fragile rag. Time let her see. She gave up her eyes. In the beginning of time, where no one lived but stark winds, too busy eerie to pay attention to the small figure—running and running. ¶ When I fell down, someone reached out and picked me up. And there I floated, there I lay. There before the mouth of time. Myth of Knowing A hand at my throat measures its hollow Knowing curls like unmounted weeps I pull out all the cotton from burlap sacks My frenzy is unmatched A fear starts at the corner of eye & finds me I taste placenta in your tear & eggs So much coal blackens my head with inextinguishable laughter You are silent I’m a stalwart thief of the garden This heart burrows into a raw well whose live voices catch in throat a frog, tongue leaping pale blade cutting through matter wisp Eyes pooled with bigness so much to see so much this world I remove the nose I had found from my face In the absence of teeth, you peer in A fallow deer spotted with forest lives here *insert call* Sound teaches me to grow a story into a boot I put my finger to your lip make bird gestures wing, not even limp but a dot Wrecked by your fair sandals what a scandal The angels were to have sung instead, this blistering fear bleak as my eye Get this this thing out of way & way may come through & mind keeps wanting to direct in directing, I lose flaccid Shimmying down the fan in the middle of room blown to pieces by a satin eye Once I shimmy down, I’ll land closing my eyes it must break open Myth of Light Phenomenal filtering of whi te, spry as my I breathe in world each night each stone each love each wa ter breathe world in flickering like porous ~ film ~ strip p a l p able as living itself its substance meets my eyes & world cries I cry ka-ka- ka- fishes nudge side of my head their iridescents thump purple thump rose thump O what lives wash down my body wash me down run run trickle down my temples like b l o o d b l o o d t h i c k e r your ropes turning into me flickering I am full it runs across my face thin as runs across my arch
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Monica Mody is the author of Kala Pani (1913 Press, 2013), which was selected by Shelley Jackson for the 2010 Sparks Prize postgraduate fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. Mody received the 2007 Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship and the 2006 Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry and cross-genre experiments, and work in The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry, &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, Boston Review, Eleven Eleven, The Volta, Dusie, MiPOesias, and Wasafiri, among other places.
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