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Irène Mathieu​

After emailing a copy of Audre Lorde's essay "The Uses of the Erotic" to a friend


because of what we said at dinner about how
our bodies feel to us. To spell it out,
this is after salting my new yoga mat, which
my teacher swears will help with the slipping,
after walking the dog through piles of melting
slush – December rain on snow on mud –
after skimming an article that suggested our
phones are becoming extensions of our minds,
or something to that effect, while contemplating
all the powers I don’t know I’m giving up
this week, as measured in the light years
between my language and my body.
Last week, my partner said, when I was falling
asleep I murmured witchcraft witchcraft witchcraft
into the pillow – hypnagogic conjure I must have
inherited somewhere in the last millennium.
You know, I say, holding leaves inside my cheek,
this used to be illegal – meaning the chlorophyll
leaching directly into my bloodstream.
I worry how the screen gathers my energy,
renders my melatonin adrift & inert.
It won’t stop raining this decade, and we did it
with our unfeeling bodies. Eventually,
while falling asleep
I try to fall back a few centuries, sifting through
piles all the women like us left behind – craft
is an exercise in making, a skill that wants practice,
i.e., to become rippled with gold through every
fascial plane, and also completely soluble across
space-time – don’t pretend it makes sense
when I put it like that.
Instead, take the broad leaf, the wax,
the unrolled cloth, mouthful of river, quartz,
clutch of clay: everything is made of something.
I lay my language on it and then I take that away
and put down something that comes before
language. I put down something that comes
before           I put down something and
I come before          I put down before
language          something that comes

​

maybe I grieve by


scrolling the unlit passageways
between here              and gone

looking for symbols etched by
sticks of carbon on the black ceiling:

are you coming, frog of beyond?
moon-tongue drops a bag of bones

they melt into pools of milk
​I stir with one finger.



second attempt at going home


​here are the deer tracks we kids called signs
of God – remember? here, our father’s voice,
an olive oil lacquer over the dinner table:
this is what we believe, this is what we don’t.

family is a kind of country, I think, like the one
we drew around the deer’s hoof prints in the mud
of the dried-up creek in the woods behind our house.
we declared ourselves leaders, knowledge-keepers,

the way most humans will once they claim
a land as their own. my brother and I walk the
quiet streets of the country he calls home now,
and I confess to him that I’ve always felt in exile.
 
I read that Robert Hayden once said,
because no place is home, in a sense, everywhere
can be home. I tell my brother this and he smiles,
and the primroses open their moon faces toward

a statue of a leader on a rectangle of land called
a park. here we are, on a nearby bench, siblings
recalling the night sky from which we both came –
our mother. praise the woman who taught us how

to clean a bathtub well, how to sauté garlic and onions
like an invocation to the worship we’d do
in the kitchen. praise anyplace where you
are well-fed. here is one way to go home:

find your brother, find a bench (any),
pull the yarn out of each other’s throats until
your language finds its hooves again,
hear your common gallop over the land.

what if, more than place, it’s about sound?

if it’s movement that matters – places knit together
over time – vibrations – then I need to hear you
say what and where we are, no matter the answer,
and hear how many ways I can ask –





--
Dr. Irène P. Mathieu is a pediatrician and writer. She is the author of Grand Marronage (Switchback Books, 2019), which won Editor’s Choice for the Gatewood Prize and runner-up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern Book Prize, orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), which won the Bob Kaufman Book Prize, and the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press, 2014). Irène is on the editorial boards of Muzzle Magazine and the Journal of General Internal Medicine's humanities section. A member of the Jack Jones Literary Arts speakers’ bureau, she has received Fulbright, Callaloo, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships.

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  • Home
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025