Poems for Z

I arrive
pregnant with expectation
thrilled to start a new day
up the winding cliff face.
She lies still
on her cot, tiny chest
shuddering with the effort of each breath.

I lay
hand after hand
on her shrunken back
waiting for reassurance
as they feel the juddering
shaking
catching as she breathes.

They send us
as we are never sent
clutching red file under one arm
listless child in the other
dressed in her best
as if to show
our weakest at their greatest strength.

The doctor reads off her history
no birth date
and that hits me hard in the chest
zero October two thousand and nine
our tiny soul
pneumonia, malaria, suspected meningitis
and if they had been right!
no sweet babe in my arms.
Hold for observation.

She tests negative for malaria, no fever
and not a cringe when the needle
plunges through her paper thin
first percentile skin.

Blood filled with questions
painful suspicions squeezed ruthlessly
and without dissent
from her tiny fingertip

She is too small for chest scans
too young for an HIV test
so she is offhandedly handed
a prescription for antibiotics

Treat for pneumonia
Nothing else we can do.
For once first and third world agree
today we helped
but her prospects are not good.
Nothing else I can do.

Once a mother
in who knows what state
of agony or ecstasy
looked down and named her Zawadi. Gift.

Dusk

To hear it told, and I have, endlessly, I was born the serious, unsmiling, difficult child. I'll never match my brother's lightness, and every moment I spend next to him makes my feet heavier, roots unfurling into the ground. Even when left to myself, I ended up like a moth, drawn to your sunny smile, your carefree embrace of pleasure and life, the way you made me laugh. Reveling in the moments you made me feel weightless. But at some point something shifts, the drink that feels pressured, packing a bowl as soon as we get home, or before we can go out: the moments of passionate ambition that crumble to dust in the light of day, the moments of vulnerability that give a glimpse of the depth and rawness of your wounds, still, and the feeling of air on them makes you jerk away, shield them farther from me. I stand here, all my flaws in full view, painfully open for you, and it's too threatening to your cloak of sunshine to really see me. You flaunt your light as if to prove it to yourself, casting me into shadow by default. You ask me if I mind you having another drink, that if it bothers me you'll stop for the night, and I hate having to ask you, knowing that if left to your own devices, you'd keep going until you'd driven away all of the depth and intelligence that keeps me in love with you. And so go ahead babe, and I drove us home, and I laid next to you as you laughed, vodka soaked whispering in my ear, and I was alone.

So now I'm back home, without you, and my brother blows through the house, a whirlwind of blond hair and snatches of unexpected accents, picking up and shrugging off personalities like so many baubles, and my smiles tug at my inadequacy. But he hides no cavernous hollows, he's never had to darken me to lighten himself, and I'd love him with or without ambition, intensity, depth. We're yin and yang, but he never asks my permission, so I don't have to give it, and there's no pretense that we're balanced, and I don't know if it's better or worse, but at least here I know when I'm alone.

Jewelry

I sometimes feel like I put on jewelry like armor, when I'm nervous, when I'm scared of how I'm going to be perceived. Before a date that has me filled with butterflies. I slip on my bracelet gauntlets, my rings like brass knuckles, my necklaces like shields. They impose a distance, no one can stroke my wrists, nuzzle my neck, kiss my fingers. I am buffered by my work, and by the excuse to speak, to defend myself: Yes, I made it out of blowtorches and steel and metal dredged from the ground, adorned it with sharp stones, it is mine. A demonstration of my control over extreme elements (over myself, over you).

Part III

The orderlies make the days pass, differentiate morning from evening from night. Eric, a hugely muscled ex-gang member with olive skin and light eyes treats us like people, listens to us. He hears me go on about this and that, school and work and art and he asks me why I'm here, and I lose it completely. He sees my rage, takes me into another room, holds pillows against his body and tells me to let go. I punch him, over and over again, speaking aloud all of the things I'm afraid to say, afraid to fail, afraid to lose. Things I may never have said aloud. And I cry, and with each punch feel both lighter, in terms of heaviness, and darker, in terms of light. And like my feet might be touching the ground, one toe at a time.

Dreams

For as long as I can remember, significantly before I actually started driving, I've had these endlessly repeated dreams where I'm trying to drive and I end up in the backseat, or in the passenger seat, or the brakes simply will. not. work. And I swerve, and I can't reach, and I do everything right and the car absolutely will not do what I want. Last night I had the second version of those dreams - where I try to punch or hit someone and I can't. My arm feels like it starts out in air, by mid-swing through water, and ends up as though I'm trying to punch through sand. I don't remember whether I'm attacking or defending - I think I've had dreams with both - but I'm just unable to make my way through it. I'm ineffectual. I'm fundamentally unable to function the way normal people do. I had these dreams for YEARS before even beginning to think about them, that feeling of trying to do something but everything turning out wrong, uneven, I'm in the wrong place and the wrong time... nothing about that surprised me.

I realize that other people don't automatically feel like that. That just maybe, the fact that I'm a capable and successful human being should, could, translate into FEELING like a successful and human being, even subconsciously, even in my dreams. That's a completely alien idea to me.

So maybe it's a good first step that I'm recognizing this is odd? That I know consciously it doesn't necessarily have to be like this forever? But how do I defend against my brain and it's dreams?

Part II

By fourth grade I was so angry and so sad that I was sent to my first psychiatrist. At least, that's what I'm told. I remember puzzles, a high filing closet, a cats cradle. It felt useless but I walked away with string in my hands and an art box, learned to busy my hands when my brain started to bubble. Later I'd busy my hands with razors, thumbtacks, bad poetry, sticking my fingers down my throat, overloading myself with schoolwork until I collapsed or someone noticed. And with art.

My mother brought my spool of silver wire to the hospital, my skewers for weaving it. They let me take it out when it's quiet, which is most of the time, and sit in the common spaces twirling hair-thin wires into a hollow woven tube. It needs to be four feet long to tie the way I want it to. I'd planned it out months ago, plated gold, stuffed with pearls, my crocheted noose. An art piece for my collection. I weave it here, tell the orderlies it's just a necklace, which it is, also. Impress them with my calm, with my ability, she seems so together. And I quietly work away, laughing a little at the irony, but only on the inside.

Art/Craft

So I'm a jeweler and a metalworker, and a women's studies major, and a religion minor, and I read almost exclusively nonfiction, primarily science. And I fuck with people's ideas about left and right brain, and artists and intellectuals - there is a perception that one invalidates the other, that thinking and feeling are mutually exclusive. It drives me crazy. I think the problem is that people have internalized that attitude, that art is fundamentally different from academics and requires no knowledge of the world outside of personal experience. And certainly some good art comes out of a very limited worldview, some art wouldn't be as good if it weren't from such a specific place. But the upper middle class slackers are often just too lazy to learn, and chose art because they wouldn't be forced to learn there. Like Andy Warhol's quote, "Art is anything you can get away with." You know what? Fuck you, Andy. Look, if you've had no new experiences in your life, if you come from a place that's "been done" and have no new insights on it, there's no way to make good art out of that, by my definition. I feel like real art requires either a fresh insight on something personal, or a connection or reference to something in the world, some new piece of knowledge about how the world connects, some commentary. And for that you need to know things. Read books. Go to other countries. Take classes. Try to understand how and why things are the way they are. Sexism, racism, classism, poverty, hunger, war, mythology, xenophobia, these are the experiences humanity has been defined by. I feel like good art, maybe any art, requires of the artist knowledge, connection, empathy.

And what about things that are just pretty? I'm torn. At the end of the day art needs to talk about something, speak with its own voice. Sometimes that can be about innovative form, or space, or expressive color, but then it has to be that much more impressive, that much stronger, and frankly there's not much that hasn't been done before, and better. Pretty doesn't cut it at the end of the day. Does that make me a traitor to metalwork and jewelry, especially? Maybe. I would restrict the category of art to pieces that talk about something outside themselves. Either narrative work, or pieces that go really above and beyond in how they interact with the body, what they say about space and form. By my own definition, perhaps the majority of my work wouldn't fall into that category. That's OK. I don't feel like a piece has to be "art" to be valuable, either. Craft is impressive, craft is valuable, craft is a language unto itself. And into the category of craft, I would add most representational painting and drawing and representational sculpture. Just because these are older mediums doesn't mean they are inherently more valid.

And why does it matter? The art/craft distinction? I think the dividing line comes back to where I started from - intelligence as it is measured in the outside world. Knowledge, connection, allusion, insights about the stuff of life. Perhaps even in my perfect world, where art and craft are acknowledged and valued separately, artists would still be looked down on by those in academia. But at least then it would be easier to see it for what it often truly is - a yearning for a life they didn't have the courage to grasp. Luann points out in her blog, "As Bruce Baker says so enchantingly, “To ‘normal’ folks, artists are people that ran away to join the circus!” Fair enough. But is it too much to ask that intelligence and insight and real content not be dismissed just because they're found under the Big Top?