March 2024
Zoeglossia Poem of the Week Series: Crip Tides of the Lunar Day
Curated by Genevieve Arlie
Even after years of flares and remissions, of crash cycles at intervals of hours to years, you doubt your capacity to heal. The caves of fatigue are so singularly deep as to resist recognition; each crash feels like the last crash, the one you won’t rebound from. It takes more years to realize you despair in proportion to your physical state. The harder the crash, the bluer your mood. It takes more years to realize you despair in proportion to your physical state. The worse the crash, the bluer your mood. You need to rest, drink tea, drink cocoa, drink saltwater (so, hydrate), do absolutely whatever you want within the limits of what you can and must, sleep early, and try again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It still surprises on the other side when joie-de-vivre returns with your strength. Then you’re back on your feet, out the door, sun on your face, wind in your hair, until the next time.
I note these energetic tides of chronic illness in the poems I’ve curated for Zoeglossia’s March poem-of-the-week series from Leah Nieboer (March 3) and Shamala Gallagher (March 10). Verse by these two lyricists never fails to amaze. I’ve triangulated their poems with one of my own (March 17) to map the ebb and flow of a crip day: Nieboer’s sunlit doldrums, Gallagher’s dusky flights, and my evening eye of the storm. From inside its ambience, each poem gestures at its affective antipodes to recall in one state the possibility of others and how to access them when wholly absorbed elsewhere.
In an excerpt from her in-progress manuscript Sick Future, Leah Nieboer’s words tantalize in their slinkiness, in how they slip away like sun rays on a plume of smoke. Readers do not know whether the opening her has under- or overslept, just that there is permission-taking in the act, “let her sleep,” and a subjunctive wish on waking, “Let it be morning, Sabrina.” In this uncomfortable present, someone or something else mediates her rest. Rigidly left-justified lines at double and triple spacing communicate a listless disaffection not unlike brain fog, a muddled state known to everyone with a systemic condition. Whole days can pass in the throes of our “bizarre symptoms.”
Then Nieboer’s first person breaks through with clear intent. For my part, “I am tired and I want” encapsulates my whole mentality in a crash, in which dull lassitude chases a profound fear of missing out. I imagine the pinnacle of glamor being enjoyed elsewhere. So too does the speaker, who seeks an outlet in “a year of far-off parties // a cigarette held.” Indulgence to the housebound seems like the best possible good life. Ironically, chronic revelry may lead to chronic illness when even an able body yields to overuse. To weather this change of pace, this “hollowing ever out,” the speaker takes comfort in adaptation:
I have always leaned into
key changes
the ridge road
tidewater
I’m an amateur diver.
In a vital move to the shore, the speaker goes so far as to identify as a diver: not something she does—diving, verbal—but something she is—a beginner, a lover, and a diver, nominal. As any wave jumper will tell you, if a big one heads your way, dive under, dive deep.
That is not to say succumb. In “Hyperdusk,” Shamala Gallagher describes how to come back from seductive extremes and the difficulty of the task when it means descending from poetic heights where you “[fly], hot gold flicked with lightning.” Few writers can attain Gallagher’s lyric ecstasy. Up in the stratosphere, the quick flock of the speaker’s thought-parrots builds to a pandemonium of somatized anxieties “in exploded hours scrabbling at sleep / tonguing at nail-bitten // death eros.” We follow these convolutions across lines that break off mid-thought and snap back in addendum, then reset to the margin as mania tries to climb out of its formal cage, and the writer shoves it back in. The stakes of writing here are no less than life and death, the same as the stakes of mental health.
So the speaker offers us a choice: come down into everyday sustenance and safety, or take:
one door
out into the ice swamp, where it’s too
slow to say anything, it takes months and months
or years where you forget
everything,
oh well.
Like Nieboer’s wide lineation, Gallagher’s use of the second person offers the speaker some distance from the painful truth of experience. In depressive freezes, a writer may lose their voice and vision, a high price the speaker in that state cannot muster the energy to mind. But if you can bear the orbital period of that ice age until spring, you can avoid the acknowledged third option from which there is no return. And that, at the end of the day, is poetry’s purpose: to keep us alive. Gallagher’s speaker chooses life, “clinging to a spire // in sight’s impossible glitter, / reaching for my own hand.” They choose themself, good enough and better soon, the insight of having survived their own radiance.
I connect with any relocation to water since I took up swimming as my only athletic pursuit after a decade and a half of assumed exercise intolerance that was in fact the impact intolerance characteristic of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder of the collagen. My curation for Zoeglossia this month marks the first anniversary of that diagnosis last March. In “Beached, a Beacon,” I note the high of weightlessness the first time I felt it but before I understood. That passing awareness is secondary to the sparks of the relationship externalized as fireworks over the lake even as it signals the pair’s divergent priorities: self-knowledge and self-control. Until habit and habitat divide them, this fish from her bird, they meet quietly in the middle.
Disability takes us through the full spectrum of human emotion on crip time. The tides rise and fall, freeze over, thaw to flow again. The current may be swift. Swim if you can; tread water, hold on if you can. Help is coming; treatment is coming. If not today, then soon. We are writing our way through it with you.
Gratefully yours,
Genevieve Arlie
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline twenty-four hours a day.