My husband makes me a damsel—
red hooded, eyes veer off the path—with thrusts and strikes. I watch myself be stripped naked. Everyone is hungry. Everyone wants to eat. Make me a pedestal. The daughters–my daughters–I am the voice in their ears, the wolf long-low howling.
My daughter tells me she needs green gloves for swimming. Green to the elbow. My youngest wants a teacup covered in fur. Preferably fox. Head and tail attached. I sit with my family at dinner. Today, the body feels okay. Not good. The body is golden and rounded at the corners, wishes to be square. Some days, pain is so orderly it feels good like lined up shoes or boxcars in a tight row.
I can speak to the children. All three are the same as me. Like speaking to my hand or knee. My husband and I grow cold each morning like oatmeal. Is this how we are all meant to feel? Will all someday feel? Congealed?
I write letters to the children, silent in my head every night to help me find sleep. Children are literal and also a device meant to evoke a feeling. I’m not sure what feeling. Save the Children. Women and children first. See. Now you feel something. Now you look to your own child—twelve and kicking a ball or four and grubby with chocolate, clutching a family quilt. Or you picture television children, nephews, or the girl from down the street out at night alone on her pink three wheel bike. Everyone has a string to pull labeled Child. My son, my daughter, and my youngest eat pizza on a blue snowflake blanket some nights. My husband writes a letter to our son every year on his birthday. Saves it in the closet for someday.
When a letter begins with You, I’m certain what comes next will be goodbye. I can’t stop imagining my husband in bed with another person, entering them from behind or their bodies pushed tight together against a wall. I’m certain this is punishment for becoming fat. I want to remember fat sneaking up on me, but it wasn’t like that. Fat was intentional—frosting from the can.
At our son’s first funeral, he stood over the powdered body and asked, Does the carcas take all that jewelry when it goes? He has only read about the dead, only animals—mostly deer and dogs, a spider. This reading was intended to teach empathy. I tell him not to say carcass. Our son laughs and laughs, holds my hand tighter and tighter. We’ve discussed this laughing before. I put my arm around his shoulders. Laughter is the same as sobbing from behind—all the cousins and uncles in the filling pews behind us. Laughter is the body pushing grief out from the shoulders through shuddering.
Allison Blevins is the queer disabled author of three full length collections and four chapbooks. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children.