Land of altered bodies

In the summer of 2016 we met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. As poets with physical disabilities, we immediately found much in common and quickly became friends. In the months that followed, we talked and wrote frequently to each other about our lives, our bodies and our experiences of being in the world. As our friendship evolved, it naturally gave rise to work; we began writing together — first, a set of essays in conversation, which were published last year, and eventually a book titled In the Field Between Us, a collaborative collection of poems.
 
Those poems, three of which are published here, detail our experiences with disability and medical intervention, and the subsequent grief and isolation that such intervention creates. The project began as a series of letters between us, designed to give voice to anxieties we had once experienced alone and that, until our friendship, had gone largely unspoken. We hope that in their current form, the poems convey the buoyancy of two voices in dialogue and allow the reader an entry point into a deeply specific experience with universal resonances. (The full collection will be published by Persea Books in 2020.)

 
The book begins with a letter from S that details this speaker’s dream about the possible loss of her legs, an imaginary space wherein she feels finally free of the heft and weight of the years of surgery, bodily alteration and physical disability. The second speaker, M, replies with an invitation to delve into that shared psychic space. Thus begins a series of letters that situates the speakers in relationship to each other and enacts their shared struggle to locate a stable sense of self.
 

Dear M —
The dream where I’m legless
isn’t a nightmare, and I’m not

afraid — there’s light and a river
and everything is exactly
how I’d hoped. I’m not tethered
to the earth. I’m not tied down
by gravity, dragging my legs
along the bank gravel, not searching
for the softest patch of moss.
I’m not even tired, and though
I’m certain the dream
is an elegy, it sounds exactly like
a praise song. In the dream
my legs break free of me
and I watch them float away.
The coffin in my chest
blows open in the wind,
and for once I think I know
what it’s like to be without
all our dead and heavy things.

Dear S —
I’ve said this all before
and anyway, you had
already been picked up,
held down, put under,
and refashioned;
you were already
dreaming your body
in some gravity-less
country, already calling
it a river, Mars. Let’s go
back to wherever it is
we were made for first:
to water, or a rusted
windswept planet where
everything floats and women
are part horse or fox, knocked
off kilter and galloping left
to get where they were meant
to go. We’d miss it here eventually.
The boat that brought us, I believe
in it. But having found you
I am seeking out the channel

where we came from.
Sister, take my hand?
 
Dear M —
What we leave down
in the canyon — the stain
of us — red on red,
hemoglobin on hematite,
the trace of us the one true
map we’ll ever leave. Hidden
out of sight, a place only
forgotten animals tread, we’re
pinned to rock in outline
and sketch, the idea of us
a puzzle no one’s yet seen
or read. Unclasped
by bodies and their weight,
we start again, we take
another shape, we learn
our worth by learning
what we’re not, like new
animals or children who,

finding themselves wingless, still
test the air and fall.
 
As the sequence develops, a collective, imagined landscape begins to take shape: The speakers find themselves caught between the desire to be at home in spaces that aren’t made for them and a desire to be lost among the wild, uncultivated landscapes — woods, rivers, canyons and fields — that more readily resemble their untamable bodies. A central paradox emerges: How can a body that can’t return to its natural form, since it has been irrevocably altered by the violence of surgery, ever be at home in the natural world? And if it can’t go home, how can an imagined home be fashioned from what resources remain?

 
Ms McCully Brown and Ms Nevison are poets. This is an edited version. ©2018TheNewYorkTimesNewsService