Magdalena Ball #25: Gut Feeling

Gut Feeling

Not everything in the memory banks is linguistic. At ten months, I had some language. For example, I was able to shout “Mommy” while banging on the bathroom door. I was able to walk, label many things, and to clearly articulate what I wanted. I wasn’t able to verbally explore the complexities of fear. It was more of a smell, a colour, a visceral sensation that might have had its origins in the pit of my stomach, rather than the prefrontal cortex.

I felt it coming on before the incident: a buzz through the skin, a sick anticipation. My mother was tired, pacing the apartment, not cooking, not eating, and crying continuously. I couldn’t articulate the foreboding and get help, though I groaned with stomach pain. I could barely say my own name. But in the moment when she disappeared into the bathroom, I knew we were in trouble, and if I couldn’t get that door to open, the world would end.

I banged until my knuckles were bruised. I shouted until my throat was raw, and though I don’t remember what happened beyond that point, help must have arrived in the form of my grandmother, who was always visiting. She took over, got my mother to the hospital to be painfully brought back to life, crying “I just wanted to sleep”. Once Grandma was in charge, talking sharply to my mother about my future and her obligations, and cleaning/cooking/sorting, it was clear that we were going to be okay and I could go back to being a baby. After that language flooded in.

Language became a panacea. I had learned that safety was temporary, and that fear was something I would need to learn to navigate.  I would need to become stronger, tougher, and more fluent with words to survive.

Lizz Murphy - Poem 336: Preambles

PREAMBLES

This couple lean and worn in who never leave their home town have travelled wait not so patiently for the next stage They’d just be having breakfast around now and another three hours to go Some flick magazines young men poke at the net send texts one up very late stretches yawns lolls low on one elbow he might as well lie down Others stare ahead for a long time you wonder what each is facing A daughter attempts cheeriness her mother one foot in a velvety slipper one in dressings as white as eighty-five year old hair She slumps now in her wheelchair The vascular team arrives a leggy registrar poses giraffe-like is excited to be in the theatre gets to watch over shoulders might get to hitch a stitch or two

Lizz Murphy — Poem 83: We tried to tell him

Lizz Murphy — Poem 82 (Take 2): Paperbarks

with thanks to Sarah St Vincent Welch 
and her New Acton Ekphrastic for the prompt

Lizz Murphy — Poem 82: Paperbarks (thanks to SSTVW)

with thanks to Sarah St Vincent Welch and her New Acton Ekphrastic for the prompt

#69 Kevin Brophy 'Perseverance all around'

I read a John Kinsella poem about St John the Baptist. The school across the road here is the John Pujajangka-Piyirn School—The school of Desert John. This morning I saw large tracks of a beast in the road outside, a camel cutting through town I thought, but no, it was the loose heifer roaming for grass around our corner. This could be a cattle station. I watch Indigenous TV, where the master of the Ernabella Choir talks of the beauty of Pitjintjara for song since all its words end in long vowels. He talks of having a real donkey and a real camel at nativity plays, and the fullness of the sound a camel makes when emptying its capacious bladder while a choir sings a hymn. John Kinsella writes of a ‘dry perseverance’ on the land. A man knocks on my door and we talk, while the choir sings behind us on the television, about how one might manage to write poetry in this place. A woman with a child knocks at the door a little later to ask if we have furniture we are throwing away. I need a cupboard, she says. Six daughters, seven grandchildren, and cousins. We walk to the school along a dusty track across the oval in single file.