Cake Somebody Momma Made & She Put Her Foot in It

I. From “Blood Labyrinth”

I split and split again and wade in pools of skin to gather into folds.
There is a rhythm to it and a rhyme and a burgeoning desire.
     Part and main part,
in which to take and grant sanctuary to excess and radiate defiant
aliveness and injurability. To know by coccyx, sacrum, and length
     of spine
the long-celled tissues of motion and organs, dense cords of force,
     tough bands
and articular extremities of bone and substance of bone. And dark canal
     and external orifice
and membranes collecting sound.

II. A Story I Once Told

When I was seven and entering third grade I got a pair of Pooh galoshes for back to school. They were transparent marigold-yellow rubber with a single toggle clasp. They were too roomy to run in but I could stomp and splash ‘til puddles disappeared and my feet still remained dry. So the walk to school was a cinch.

Remember when… Overshoes?—Anne Sexton’s smoky voice and a stone frog in my ear.

I ignored them both and went on with the telling:

For the first time, my everyday shoes that year were not made by a cobbler: they were store-bought: lace up tan leather uppers with rubber bottoms and bumble bees stitched on the sides. They were sturdy-ish and round like Earth shoes, like maybe something you might actually want to wear. It was a coup for me thanks to my new school—normal looking shoes so my new kid cooties would eventually wear off.

Much later, among Michael Harper’s lists of many titles for poems I was to write was an ode to my orthopedic past—something like “Bad Feet”—I always heard the corns lyric from Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus” when I encountered that title, that list in my papers. I felt some sort of way about it. I think I threw it away, the list. I am still writing that poem.

III. And the hard, rigid substance

Even with my orthopedic shoes, as a child I dreamed of being an Olympic track athlete or at least a state champ. Since I couldn’t jump double dutch and couldn’t turn (double-handed) I ran relay races during grade school recess. I was fast. I always won. I even beat the boys in my grade. I boasted a pretty mean standing long jump in middle school—although the Phys Ed Department was basically our science teacher with a lanyard whistle and a clipboard. I loved to sprint, run relay races, and hurdle and was excited for high school, competitive teams, coaches, and actual training. But, before I could try out for track as a frosh I began suffering excruciating pain. First it was dull in my feet at the arches. Then it reached down to my toes and up to my knees. Shooting needles. Constant. Tylenol did nothing. My mom took me from podiatrist to orthopedic surgeon. There were bones growing into my tendons, pulling them away from their sites of attachment. So I went from dress-code-flouting gym shoes to crutches and surgery two days after Christmas and wheelchairs and lunch in the Dean’s Office. Nerd of nerds and so obviously different. I was forbidden to run. No contact sports for at least 5 years.

All of HS into college and after. My feet that tired easily, seizing. And sometimes, as if they held fast to a discarded design, they seemed to seek to remain hidden. I still have a cane.
Why?
Sometimes I need one.
Why?
Because I need support for walking.
Why?
Because my feet cannot do it alone.
Why?
Because that is a consequence of being alive as this body.

IV. Cake Somebody Momma Made and She Put Her Foot in It aka “My Feet Keep Dancing” à la CHIC (Risque, 1979)

So often, joy manifests for me through sound. Sounds I hear and sounds I make. In the midst of writing and thinking through writing, I listen and read aloud. Sometimes I do voices. Sometimes I turn on the radio (NPR). Or sing. And dance. Or I lie down, elevate my lower extremities, and listen to my body’s sounds. When I lie down I often listen to the call and response of my heart muscle: 1,2 1,2: evenly (s)paced but seemingly separated as if by a caesura because of a slight shift in pitch. Other times I pull out favorite music collections, books, or playlists of poems. Lately at home I have been mulling around in the The Motorcycle Diaries motion picture soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla (2004) because I imagine songs and poems in its silences.

In my car I have alternately been immersed in Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel (2005), Red Hot & Riot (2002) and Whitney Houston’s I’m Your Baby Tonight (1990).

Recently, in between bursts of writing, I started tweaking this instrumental track (see below) with a plan to lay vocals from a poem-in-progress. As my alter ego DrPoMo would say: “If ya wants mo’ funk, ya gotsta po’ mo’ funk. Po’ mo’ fo’ mo’ and then some. So get in where you fit in, friend.” Here’s a sneak eek (ear peek).
 

In a newly initiated poetics project, I am inviting poets and artists to participate in my creative-critical arts practice by attending to the Call & Response Performance Ensemble’s prompt to conduct Experiments in Joy (first announced at Antioch College in 2014). Folk are invited to share reflections and creative works towards shared joy and our collaborative creation of the worlds we inhabit—and the worlds that inhabit us. This is one of the responses.

***

Anti-Research Research
Sade Murphy, Brooklyn NY 

For my second critique of the spring my mentor and I recorded a conversation while he taught me how to polish my boots. My contribution to our program’s Collaborative Writing Practices is the performance of Anti-Research Research. A way to honor direct experience as knowledge and to acknowledge feeling, connection as intelligence. I asked Christian about how and when he came to poetry and he told a wonderfully cerebral origin story. Then it was my turn. I talked about a story I wrote, illustrated, laminated and “deadicated” to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Davidson. She was a young black woman. I was enamored with her. She was pretty, kind, smart and she believed all those things to be true of me as well.

“Wait, what was the name of the story?” Sasha asks.

I grin at my boots. “A Story for My Teacher.” It was about a little girl who decided to write a story for her teacher and all the things she did to make that happen. Laughter pops around the room. Sasha curls into a ribbon of giggles. This is one of my favorite childhood memories. A memory like a morphine drip.

I say, “Yeah I know. I was so meta.”

It’s a silly story that encapsulates a preferred poetics. That the most valuable writing is a means to express the care for and survival of black/brown women/nonbinary people. That there is power in what critique will reduce to self-pity and self-obsession. Anyway, the first thing I ever wanted to be was a teacher.

*

At the beginning of the year I felt dangerously hopeful. I moved to New York. I got a new tattoo. I cried a lot. My heroin addict roommates moved out/away and I found two new roommates. I completed my first semester. I genuinely enjoyed my MFA program. I made friends. I worked in the campus library. I fell in love with a girl. I taught myself to braid hair and roll blunts. I took a ferry on the solstice with Adjua. I let myself be witchy. I wrote everyday. I got the bursar’s office to stop fucking up my financial aid. I felt financially secure. I opened a savings account. I quit smoking. I found a great therapist. I had insurance. I cried a lot. I had many experiences for the first time, including oysters. I was groped by a man riding a bicycle while walking to campus. That same day my boss’s boss met me and instantly decided I had an “attitude problem” and my supervisor never missed an opportunity to remind me. I went to Sephora with Stephon. My back bottom right molar split in half. I had it extracted. I got dry socket. After I bought a couch for the apartment one of my roommates decided I was “overcontrolling” and “unfair.” His behavior became increasingly abusive. My other roommate actively refused to get involved because he wanted to remain “neutral” and he felt I was “overreacting.” My landlord was a piece of shit. Every legal entity I interacted with from the 79th Precinct to Judge Hecht to Brooklyn’s DA Action Center was uniquely designed to fail and humiliate me with politely folded hands. I went to therapy twice a week. I took Cymbalta everyday. I tried my best to show up for and sit through classes while my life felt like a billowing tire fire. Retail therapy. I cried a lot. Dinner with M. NourbeSe Philip. At AWP I sat next to Claudia Rankine during a poetry reading. I moved out of my apartment, put everything in storage. I hemorrhaged money. I stayed with Cecily and Sasha. Beyonce’s LEMONADE. I found a new home with roommates who respect and care for me. I wrote “Haarte,” a sixty page bilingual poem, with the help of my living dictionary Maria. I went to the gynecologist and found out that my cervix is perfect. I nursed my houseplants back to health. I quit the library and started a placement at the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project as writer in residence. I gardened with my roommates. I went to the beach. I cried a lot. Beyonce’s Formation World Tour. I wrote postcards across the ocean. I return to South Bend. Housesitting. Silk painting. Blueberry picking. Goats. I’m depressed and skype with my therapist twice a week. I water the plants. I sleep irregularly. I cry a lot. I touch the book spines but I don’t read them. I feel like a spool of embroidery thread against the blade of a box cutter.

*

Sometimes I notice, when I mention how I’m feeling or I recount how an experience has affected me, a slight shift in the other person’s energy. A shuttering withdrawal I observe when people assume that I expect more from them than they are willing or able to give. A nonchalant dismissal as their eyes glaze over or they try to convince me that things aren’t so bad.

Sometimes when I’m triggered I burst into tears. I talk about crying a lot because I cry a lot. Sometimes things just hurt, but never for no reason. Sometimes crying is the only way to alleviate pain. And it’s good for my skin.

*

Last year Saturn returned to Sagittarius and started remodeling my First House. Akin to building a structure out of molten lava. The near futility of insisting that one’s self make sense and remain within well defined limits. Buckle down, sit up straight, get it together. A core lesson in showing up. Come as you are. The strain of the return was softened by Neptune. Neptune remains retrograde and domicile in Pisces, bobbing in my Undersky, the place for who I am in private. The gift of plants proliferating under water. The ability to handle one’s roots with compassion, to grow and lay down newer, healthier roots.

I’m two-thirds through my Saturn’s Return. In about a month I’ll be thirty. It’s a threshold I wasn’t expecting to reach. Chiron’s dwells with Neptune. Chiron feels for, studies the underlying locus of pain. Whistles canary style throughout the trauma site. Neptune irrigates the exposed wounds, reteaches them to breathe while Chiron conjures ancestral philharmonic healing. Giftschrank as a model for transcendental wellness.

One cannot be without the other. Showing up authentically with composure, rage masterfully inscribed into my skin, requires the active acknowledgement of that which hurts me to my core. To overfill with compassion for myself, keenly attuned to my own survival. This is the work I want to create. That’s the work I invite you to create alongside me.

*

I doubt I would be a good teacher. I don’t like having to adhere to unfair, nonsensical institutional rules. The only subject I know well is what it means to exist in my body. This black body. This woman body. This agender body. This queer body. This ill body. This fat fatigued body. This poor injera body. This soft boiled egg body. This tender clumsy thing. This truthful, creating thing.

If joy is possible at all, accept the body as knowledge, be immersed in the pedagogics of refusing invalidation, perform the anti-research research, then let all the data slip through your fingers.