Unsick Act :: In Corpore Sano Presents Roxanna Bennett
Somatic poems and a practice statement from poet Roxanna Bennett
Roxanna Bennett shares somatic poems in both print and audio, accompanied by a short practice statement on her poetic work. According to Bennett, “My bodymind is my practice and process. As I have aged, my ailments/impairments have progressed to the point where I am largely housebound and solitary, but this solitude has freed me to turn inward completely to a creative practice. I do not differentiate between the work of managing daily life through a disabled bodymind and the Work of writing. As my ability to move in the world deteriorates, the structure of the Work reflects this process of breakdown.”
Expanded and additional work from Bennett appears in the forthcoming initial print volume of In Corpore Sano.
O Bruise
be my gurney and I will sponge your shit
from improbable ceiling
untangle your tubes palpate
the dangling bag wobbling
above your shrunken head
palm me your pill pack sister
deposit sharps here
in the nexus of scars radiating from
my collapsed navel
o limbs twisted in our mingled misery
o dose set o diaper o diazepam
o envy of able that sticks
like the gummy grey outline
band-aids leave behind
o bruise
be my visiting hours and I will spoon feed you the shit
the living say
to the left behind
Unbecoming Prophecy
I’ve lost the knack of knowing
how to unsick act
or what connects the dark glass towers to
thudding tunnels underground
service corridors are arterial necessity
chemical waste food blood
o live a little less and if it cleanses
breathe it out
rot is where I bud in grubby fug
my fascia blooms blood cells
knotted knobs in wrong places
seethes with toothed life
chews through deep muscle
fits system an elaborate fuck you to intentions
fulfills the unbecoming prophecy
of death by mediocrity
wear down weatherless weeks old metal sheds
anchor appointment blank blank appointment
grudge water portioned in plastic cups
am told I clean up well or was that what I said
to scab over this wish to be ugly instead of ill & old
Atlas of Anchors
her tongue is winter
and this body hard earth
this body is a mass grave
and I am the memorial
to be a body nothing grows inside of
to be a body ripe with wrong
this body buckles
its gravity a gas giant
this body seethes the fractal fascia
classical atlas of anchors
to be a body that cages only
to be a body captures loss
her mouth is summer
but this body has no season
Sharp Things
Nothing Like an Iceberg
Practice Statement
Several of these poems come from a workshop I took with CA Conrad while on a weekend pass from the hospital. They were written using several of CA’s somatic methods. It was a deeply unsettling experience to travel from the tightly regimented hospital ward to a small, intimate room and share in intensely personal rituals with strangers, and to produce this work that seemed to vomit itself out of my body.
I usually write very formal, constrained work but the long, tedious course of various illnesses, mental and physical, has worn my patience with formalism. I find it difficult to sustain interest in writing what seems a hierarchical, fundamentally elitist and therefore inaccessible form. To create is to be embodied, which is a painful state; to resist the systems that keep me ill is to write against that. To communicate with others who are also bed-bound, or patients, or consumer survivors, has become the thread of practice that holds most meaning.
Roxanna Bennett is a poet living with disability. Her works include Unseen Garden (chapbook, knife | fork | book, 2018), The Uncertainty Principle (Tightrope Books, 2014), and Unmeaningable, forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press in Fall 2019. She lives in Whitby, Ontario.
IN CORPORE SANO: Creative Practice and the Challenged* Body, is a transdisciplinary collection and conversation by, on, and for bodies-against-within-despite, in the form of an ongoing web series and a forthcoming print:document series (preorder a copy here!). If you’d like to be a part of ICS, rolling submissions for the project are once again open.
With thanks to managing editor and lead facilitator Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson].
