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.