The Moon is News that Stays News
My Book "About" Abortion + a Shameless, Scarlet Letter Prompt
It’s been over a decade since my first book Samsara won the Noemi Press Poetry Prize. It took a decade to write and publish it; hundreds of dollars on contest submissions, over 100k in student loans; resistance to rejection, poverty, cruelty; gallons of blood, sweat, and tears. My holy grail was a tenure-track job.
Shortly after graduating from my Ph.D. program, I was in a car accident that left me with a disability of chronic migraine and knocked me out of the job market. As a first generation college, masters, and doctoral student, my journey in academia had already been brutal. I felt like I collapsed on the finish line and have only recently gotten back up.
If you’re tempted to give me advice about my migraines, please, uh, DON’T. I’ve tried Botox, countless medications, meditation…Basically everything except a frozen vibrator to the eye a la Nikki Glazer. People with chronic illness are mostly in need of empathy and company, as it’s isolating. We often already feel like it’s our fault that we are sick, which is a mental burden to carry on top of the physical one.
People with chronic illness are like canaries in the coalmine. They tell us that capitalism is making us sick, and there’s no quick fix.
I’ve felt ashamed for not “doing more” with my accomplishments. But I’ve decided: fuck that. The archetype of the witch is shameless; she doesn’t necessarily even reject shame, it’s just not in her DNA. She has inspired me to speak out.
The publishing industry’s pressure for writers to constantly produce to stay “relevant” is more of capitalism’s lies about our worth. Good work is timeless and it also takes time. This is perhaps part of what the poet Ezra Pound meant when he said, “Literature is news that stays news.”
Witches know that time and healing are spiralic so why wouldn’t creativity be as well? The moon doesn’t worry about becoming irrelevant. She may wax and wane in our eyes, but she is always there. She is fully herself, just as stunning today as thousands of years ago.
The moon is news that stays news.
So, I’m going to discuss and celebrate my poems from Samsara here! These poems are mostly language-driven, and are not typically “about” an external event or idea. They are an experience in themselves, rather than referring to an experience. But if I had to write a press release (which I did) and an introduction to my book (which I did), I’d say the central event is an abortion. Unfortunately this topic is still relevant today as women’s reproductive rights are under fire.
Here’s my many-times-rejected poem “about” abortion:
SOJOURNER
By: Erica Anzalone
Hosannas and signatures, sweetheart, womb-breath, first star, vacuum cleaner, blood-- Come back to me another day, you too good tears in the middle of winter in the parking lot. That was while you were here, alive; I want you to leave I said. Sojourner, you stood alone: picture of a leg in a leg warmer. Tight little bud, you stood again outside, unsteady as a newborn calf, and wet. Unspoken, undone, underground. Only then could I call you dear one, dream-wave, sundial. Little hiccup, I cooed. I asked you to begin again the journey you thought this lap had ended. I want you to live I said.
I was twenty-two when I wrote this poem, and thought I would have a child in the future. At forty-seven, it looks like that’s not going to happen. But I don’t regret getting the abortion.
Regret and shame are sisters. In When We Were Witches, Ariel Gore re-frames shame into a list of possibilities:
OTHER STARTING POINTS
By: Ariel Gore
Things the world has taught me to feel ashamed of: 1. Being born a female body. 2. My sexuality—the whole of it. 3. Motherhood. 4. Scars and stretch marks. 5. Debt: $127,862 in outstanding student loans, still snowballing at 8.25 percent interest from a $32K original loan. 6. My art (mostly stories). Things I have in fact felt ashamed of: 1.All items listed above. 2.Artistic failure. 3.Also, success when it draws too much attention.
Gore pulls from this list to make other lists/poems.
THINGS THAT ARE RED BESIDES THE SCARLET LETTER
By: Ariel Gore
Blood My Gammie Evelyn’s Cadillac My mother’s fingernails Passion Cherries Red Dye No. 2, which we weren’t allowed to eat when we were kids Fire The devil The apple from the tree of knowledge Also, the poison apple the witch gives to Snow White Seduction Pomegranates Bolshevik utopia Hot sauce The Red Sea, the crossing of which in alchemical symbolism refers to the most difficult stage in a person’s life Shame Insects crushed into dye Stop signs Hot peppers The first color a brain-injury patient can perceive after temporary color blindness The shoes that get Dorothy home Anger Miscarriage Fever Rash Carpets for important and glamorous people Sex-worker districts The sunrise Sunset Rising stock markets (in Asian symbolism) Falling stock markets (in North American symbolism) The color European settlers associated with Native American skin Burns Scars Stretch marks In linguistic history, the first color after black and white—meaning that all languages have words for black and white. If a third color word exists, it’s red.
PROMPT:
Write your list of “Other Starting Points,” and then choose one with a color. Write a list of things with this color. This is entering through the “side door” to write about trauma as brilliant memoirist Mira Ptacin says!
Hi Erica, Thank for your prompt and your wonderful class! This is my page in the coloring book on invisible illness:
PORTRAIT FROM THE INSIDE
After all, coffee is legal. That’s why.
My skin used to be made of a milk film. My mother would complain about the bluish milk in Belgium and hence about my complexion. It made me angry. You see, the milk I was giving her here was skimmed. It would have been bluish anywhere.
Now, after years of sleeplessness drowned in a black thick liquid, my skin has become a thin layer of soft tin. If you look closer, you see coffee vessels transpire. Fish scale sized coffee-coloured dots emerge here and there, shoulders, legs, temples. The dermatologist said it looked like mycosis. Mushroom, in other words. For sure, she meant porcini mushrooms. She did not know my staple food was coffee, not mushrooms neither pork. Let alone fish.
After my mom visits, her nostril hair are roasted. When she leaves, a layer of lemon and coal dust covers her tongue. But nothing changes outside.
I live on coffee because of insomnia. Not the other way around. The other day, I got a bit desperate. A whiff of short temper. The green Swiss knife the Swiss friend brought over from the Alps as a souvenir was at hand as always. It has a white engraving singing ‘Scharpf und spitz’ that sounds like a tune for a romantic ballad. Sometimes, I use it to open the blue-red Italian coffee tins, when, their top-pulling rings break off. It takes a little knife to cut a thin layer of tin. In the end of the day, an opening in a shape of a wide grin cut across my ankle. Yellow hypertrophied salmon eggs peeped out, like an army of soft bladder stones. Then I got scared because a great coffee fountain shot up from the grin.
I thought how ugly I looked from the inside. Fat and coffee.
The greying towel soaked brown. When I came back from the emergencies, I made myself a cup of coffee—a ristretto.
Beautiful ❤️