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  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
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      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
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      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
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      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
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      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
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      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
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      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
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      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
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      • e Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
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    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
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  • Issue #25 Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Art Spring 2023 >
      • David Carter Spring 2023
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    • Issue #25 Poetry Spring 2023 >
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      • Rita Feinstein Spring 2023
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      • Lisa Higgs ​Spring 2023
      • Dennis Hinrichsen ​Spring 2023
      • Mara Jebsen ​Spring 2023
      • Abriana Jetté ​Spring 2023
      • Letitia Jiju ​Spring 2023
      • E.W.I. Johnson ​Spring 2023
      • Ashley Kunsa ​Spring 2023
      • Susanna Lang ​Spring 2023
      • James Fujinami Moore Spring 2023
      • Matthew Murrey Spring 2023
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2023
      • Heather Qin ​Spring 2023
      • Wesley Sexton ​Spring 2023
      • Ashish Singh ​Spring 2023
      • Sara Sowers-Wills ​Spring 2023
      • Sydney Vogl ​Spring 2023
      • Elinor Ann Walker Spring 2023
      • Andrew Wells Spring 2023
      • Erin Wilson Spring 2023
      • Marina Hope Wilson ​Spring 2023
      • David Wojciechowski Spring 2023
      • Jules Wood Spring 2023
      • Ellen Zhang Spring 2023
      • BJ Zhou Spring 2023
      • Jane Zwart Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Fiction Spring 2023 >
      • Eleonora Balsano Spring 2023
      • Callie S. Blackstone Spring 2023
      • Daniel Deisinger Spring 2023
      • CL Glanzing Spring 2023
      • Janine Kovac Spring 2023
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      • Richie Zaborowske Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Nonfiction Spring 2023 >
      • Kalie Johnson Spring 2023
      • Amanda Roth Spring 2023

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 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022
  • Issue #25 Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Art Spring 2023 >
      • David Carter Spring 2023
      • Annabel Jung Spring 2023
      • Ryota Matsumoto Spring 2023
      • Leah Oates Spring 2023
      • Eve Ozer Spring 2023
      • Emily Rankin Spring 2023
      • Esther Yeon Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Poetry Spring 2023 >
      • Emma Bolden Spring 2023
      • Ronda Piszk Broatch Spring 2023
      • M. Cynthia Cheung Spring 2023
      • Flower Conroy Spring 2023
      • Jill Crammond Spring 2023
      • Sandra Crouch Spring 2023
      • Satya Dash Spring 2023
      • Rita Feinstein Spring 2023
      • Dan Fliegel Spring 2023
      • Lisa Higgs ​Spring 2023
      • Dennis Hinrichsen ​Spring 2023
      • Mara Jebsen ​Spring 2023
      • Abriana Jetté ​Spring 2023
      • Letitia Jiju ​Spring 2023
      • E.W.I. Johnson ​Spring 2023
      • Ashley Kunsa ​Spring 2023
      • Susanna Lang ​Spring 2023
      • James Fujinami Moore Spring 2023
      • Matthew Murrey Spring 2023
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2023
      • Heather Qin ​Spring 2023
      • Wesley Sexton ​Spring 2023
      • Ashish Singh ​Spring 2023
      • Sara Sowers-Wills ​Spring 2023
      • Sydney Vogl ​Spring 2023
      • Elinor Ann Walker Spring 2023
      • Andrew Wells Spring 2023
      • Erin Wilson Spring 2023
      • Marina Hope Wilson ​Spring 2023
      • David Wojciechowski Spring 2023
      • Jules Wood Spring 2023
      • Ellen Zhang Spring 2023
      • BJ Zhou Spring 2023
      • Jane Zwart Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Fiction Spring 2023 >
      • Eleonora Balsano Spring 2023
      • Callie S. Blackstone Spring 2023
      • Daniel Deisinger Spring 2023
      • CL Glanzing Spring 2023
      • Janine Kovac Spring 2023
      • Jeremy T. Wilson Spring 2023
      • Richie Zaborowske Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Nonfiction Spring 2023 >
      • Kalie Johnson Spring 2023
      • Amanda Roth Spring 2023