NAPOWRIMO 5

 Today, I'm admiring Kate Wisel's poem "Nerve Damage" which was recently published in DIAGRAM. I don't typically like DIAGRAM. The poems are often really experimental to the point that they don't really speak to me. But I challenged myself to read more of the poems, to find at least one poem that did. I stumbled upon this one, and I enjoyed it. 

Admiring Kate Wisel’s “Nerve Damage” poem

 

This is an interesting poem. It’s about nerve damage, healing after an injury, but for this speaker, the injury is both physical and emotional.

 

Do emotions, like nerves, go numb? And how can you coax them back? That’s the question driving this poem. 

 

The first few lines are pretty simple—they just describe the injury, the surgeon’s promise that the feeling will return. For me, the poem really opens up in the 4^th stanza: “my nerves, / like my old self, in my old house, refuses to // communicate with the muscles that move them.”

 

And then the poem oscillates between the physical wound and an emotional one, a bad memory of a loved one’s arrest. Most days, the feeling isn’t there. But sometimes, it returns, like the memory, “They wake in a twitch,” she tells us, meaning both the physical and emotional feeling.

 

At once, the speaker is with the surgeon at her check-up, but she’s also lost in her memory of her father “for the last time” leaving the room. ☹

 

I don’t know exactly what happened to the speaker, both from the physical and the emotional injury, but the juxtaposition is there and it’s striking.

 

In my life, I’ve had nerve damage, so much so that I walk funny, but I’m slowly regaining function in my foot and leg. The place my surgeon sliced into me remembers the trauma of my operation—it flinches even at gentle touch, even when I run my finger across it. It's like it doesn't trust anymore that touch can be soft and gentle. The nerves are still tender, but they’re reawakening. And of course, I needed to have my surgery, and as a whole, my body feels better now.

I'm thinking about the body and generational trauma, also. The cells that the doctor sliced have longed been replaced by new cells. But the new cells remember that day. It's in their DNA, I suppose. 

I made my own prompt today because I don't like the one offered by the NAPOWRIMO website. 

 

Juxtapose both physical and emotional healing in a poem. Use couplets.

 

My Scarlet Scar

 

The skin remembers—even if those old cells

All faded into history. “It’s scarlet still,”

 

My surgeon says as he lifts my shirt

To examine the scar, “but soon it will

 

Turn white again.” White like a sheet

Of paper. White like forgetting. I’m not

 

So sure. At his touch, the hair on my back

Stands up, a futile attempt to keep that hand

 

That sliced this flesh in two away. But still

It stands, even if those hairs are not the same

 

Hairs the nurse shaved off. The skin remembers

That cold November morning, heals over

 

With a tepid tenderness. It doesn’t even

Let me touch it without that feeling

 

Welling in my throat again, of tearing.

The next generation of nerves have wrapped

 

Around this skin, around this mended bone,

But still, the flesh remembers trauma,

 

Carries somewhere deeper that the surgeon

Can’t touch, nor the nurse, nor me, and nothing

 

Can make this it trust your touch again.

I guess I’m saying time heals trauma,

 

And yes, soon, the skin will turn pale again,

And this scar will be a memory, but

 

This skin, this muscle, all the cells remember

Deep within their DNA, the severing,

 

And nothing, nothing, nothing, can stich

Forgetting into the psyche.