Poetry by Jessica Freeman

This Body

When I was younger, and when I was most injured,  
most in pain, doctors told me to picture my back  
 
as an invasive plant. To imagine the spurred bones 
of my spine covered in Lamb’s Ear, Medusa, Fiddlehead Ferns.  
 
I saw my injuries as prowlers then. The blood, the tactile-ness  
turned into leaves that cut across the end of me. At night 
 
I saw light, just as the doctors had told me to. Orbs  
circling through the garden in my broken sacrum. I tried 
 
to make this light grow across pelvic floor and spine 
as I counted, one by one the plant hairs and leaves  
 
unfurling across the other side of my sweaty pillows.  
I tried to escape tendons bunched under blood and trapped 
 
in contractions. I tried to separate me from me, and unfasten 
each vertebra that had cracked under nerves. Those nights 
 
were loud, waiting in the feverish pain when sleep  
wouldn’t come, and I replayed again and again  
 
the moment when my dance partner had dropped 
me in my last performance. And the moment when a different 
 
man had invaded me. Both men and both versions of me quivered 
with me all night in bed. My arms interlocked, my pirouettes, 
 
my body washed in something I couldn’t name.  
My back and pelvis frail in night and violence and silence, 
 
trying to make a garden, trying to make my body less dangerous,  
less curved, less cracked under shadows and lamplight.

Patience

An angelic child, he trapped Locusts and Arched Hooktips into plastic  
nets we’d found at the Dollar Store. He waited for hours in ankle-deep 
water, his arms and legs mosquito bitten and burnt by the sun 
beating down on him like fire from a lit match. He held his breath, moving 
the bugs quietly from netting to a pickle jar with holes poked in the lids.  
A hyper kind of focus, a loud kind of focus. Something I didn’t understand 
about my brother. A genius, people said. He easily memorized the names 
of birds and bugs as he wrapped insects in paper towels without crunching 
their backs. He laid their death in mom’s plastic dishes once they’d gone 
to the other side. See how we already talked about death. All the words 
for the ways we stop breathing. He wrote their names with a fine black 
sharpie pen on yellowed masking tape. His need to please his teachers 
imprinted on him like the wild ducks that circled around us in our neighbor’s 
field. It was quilted into his skin, a fleshy kind of desire to make everyone 
around him proud, even if it meant a whole summer lost to proctoring 
the death of thousands of bugs before fastening their bodies with mom’s pearl 
sewing pins to dusty tile stolen from our basement ceiling. 
I remember his childhood body and the anxiety surrounding 
us both. I remember that summer as something indefinable, like a shadow 
I couldn’t yet name that gunned for us. I remember the Mississippi River 
and how quietly it rose, how none of us knew what was coming. I remember 
it like the smell of a dead deer that hung from rafters under our house, braced 
on stilts in the flood plain, as it twisted in a wet wind, its bones thin 
and crying out beneath us.