Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

There’s been a lot of good work being done about how we store trauma in the body, or how pain can change us, ranging from creative and experimental, to traditionally scientific. I’m thinking of the books The Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and The Body Keeps the Score. A recent study in The New York Times talked about new research in Glial cells and how they can “accelerate the pain system into an endless inflammatory loop that provokes the nerves into generating a perpetual pain alarm.”

My interest in physical pain is both intellectual and personal. As someone who often suffers from pain — I can’t bring myself to say the word “chronic” here because I like to make room for my pain to ease up and even disappear — I am always fascinated about how the body works, what injuries it chooses to remember, what happens once it has been wounded in some way.

As the daughter of a woman who was in an accident and now has burn scars on much of her body, I’ve had a mentor to show me what grace in one's skin can look like. She taught me what it is to love the body in all its iterations. Over the last couple years or so I have given up fighting my body and have instead chosen to move in tandem with my body. I want somehow to surrender together to this life and I no longer want to be in battle with how I feel. Of course this takes work. And I’m not always good at it. In fact, after being on tour for launching my new book, I finally saw my physical therapist and she asked, “How has your body been feeling?” And I said, “Oh, I’ve just been ignoring it.” Which I know isn’t the right answer. But I am always in the process of finding the balance between feeling peace with my body and just ignoring it all together.

Today’s poem shows us the body after it survives harm, and how we can find our true selves in the wreckage of our lives.

Scavenged
by Dion O’Reilly

	      …what becomes
	      of us once we’ve been torn apart
	      and returned to our future…
			      —Dorianne Laux

When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back,
ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone,
I ran through the house, a contagion
cindering couches and carpets.
Flayed, my fingertips peeled back
to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air,
light, and the steel cot where they took me.

Each day, they peeled me
like Velcro from my sheets,
left bits of my meat there.
Lowered me into Betadine,
scrubbed me to screams—
that became my history. Scavenged
by the curious. They see my twisted fingers
and are hungry for the tale.

I’ve done the same, stared
at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it,
feel the cut bone under the knob,
hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know
how that man was alive, arms glistening
playing basketball from a high-tech chair,
making his shots.

The body’s scarred terrain becomes
consecrated field. We gather to pick
through the pieces that remain—
an ear hanging from its hinge of skin,
diamond stud in the lobe, ring finger
shining with its promise-band of gold.

"Scavenged" by Dion O'Reilly from GHOST DOGS copyright © 2020 Dion O'Reilly. Used by permission of Terrapin Books.