Body Work

Her belly skin folded. What the hell was that all about? She lay there flat on her back in bed. Her fingers measured the deep skin folds on the sides of her belly, above the hip bone and below her ribs the skin slopped over and folded.
“Folded? Folded skin?” The words in her mind repeating as she tried to imagine this skin suit that she’d worn her entire life had now collapsed on itself.
Tears streamed hot from her eyes, out the sides burning a flow directly into her ears. She pulled her right hand out from one of the side folds and dipped her index finger into the right ear to push the warm and now waxy liquid out. It flooded back into the nape of her neck and was absorbed in the pillowcase. She felt the wet on her scalp and could care less. Prior to Shellyanne’s birth, Monica had attempted to educate herself on the changes she’d experience transitioning from young adult to new mom. But folded skin? What the hell?
Teddy had brought “his girls” (God, she wasn’t going to like that either) home from the hospital yesterday afternoon. His mom was there. Marge arrived two days before and was able to do the dishes had dispose of the pizza boxes and Chinese food containers that they’d consumed in the heavy couple of days before the trip to the hospital.
Lying there now in their bed, she had few blissful recollections of the trip home and the first couple of hours as a new family. Teddy’s mom, was at the door wiping her hands off with a limp kitchen towel. “ Bet she can’t wait to get her mitts on her,” Monica remembered that thought crossing her mind. The tension in the house lit the place all night long. Marge finally exited to the family room, pulling out the sofa bed, making her bed for the night. That left Teddy and her with the baby in limbo between the nursery and their bedroom. They’d planned to have the baby sleep in their room, but hadn’t contemplated the changing routine. They were stashing dirty diapers in odd corners, the spare bathroom, as well on the changing table. With the change there was always something missing; the wipes had been left elsewhere, baby powder, a change of clothes, etc. Thus it was a group effort with every change of the baby, one of them calling for the other to bring whatever was missing.
Then there was the feeding. The maternity ward nurses kept referring to it as getting a good “latch” and “latching on.” The image that would jump into her mind was the machines plumbed up in some barn’s milking parlor. All she knew was the struggle to get Shellyanne positioned correctly. Once in the proper angle for feeding, she’d try to guide her huge breast into the tiny face, something like docking the space shuttle to the space station. Hit or miss, she knew she’d have to endure the painful pull of the baby’s sucking on her tender skin. This whole nursing thing and the pain involved was a well kept secret, indeed.
But they’d managed the first night. They were exhausted, tense, and scared to death that if not watched 24/7 Shellyanne would quit breathing and expire.
Monica inhaled a big load of air hoping that she might then be able to exhale the stale breath she felt caught in her body. She felt her lungs strain. With that extra bit of expansion in her ribcage she felt herself lighten a bit. But as soon as she forced the last bit of air out she lost focus. She found her fingers back searching the folds of her belly and tracing a picture of baby Shellyanne in her mind. As Monica recalled the tiny fingers of the darling baby her breasts suddenly ached and a sharp sting pierced her nipples. Her hands moved from her belly up to her breasts. Gently she felt them. Hard and round they sat as solid mounds on her otherwise jellied torso. Brushing her hands over her nipples she felt them wet. The more she thought of Shellyanne the wetter she got.
All the reading and classes she’d taken during her pregnancy had sounded so magical and unreal. Now she lay there oozing sticky sweet liquid from her chest while her midsection slid over her sides. Hardly magical and much too real. Tears came again, this time uncontrolled sobbing: her body, her husband, her mother-in-law, her baby, her past, her future, ..all these topics filled thoughts of fear, pain, frustration and regret.
This was supposed to be the happiest time and she felt nothing but dark apprehension. It was supposed to be a time of spiritual insight, intense unconditional love, and the golden transition from what was to what will be. She could not go back, but she could not go forward. She was stuck, stuck in the folds of her heavy belly, stuck in the birth canal of her new life. Alive and well was what she hoped for. But alive was what she was. Alive in this new body, in this new world, with a new companion, one formed within her. Then she heard Shellyanne’s tiny cry. The smallness of this new noise worked just as those last few painful pushes. Pulling herself to her feet she felt herself snap into her new existence. And in that moment, exhaling as she stepped away from her bed she got a glimpse of immortality.

Auschwitz, Poland

June 17, 2008

Ground to bits
Under foot
Bits
Bits of bone
I stand on that ground.

Admission paid I walk
Into dank long brick lined quarters
To witness
Governmental obsession,
Legal paranoia
Civil obliteration
Whereby morality was
ground to bits

Body of evidence, Scene one

Behind the glass wall
Piled froths of human hair
Grayed dull with age
Braided piles tossed
Yet to be woven and
Rolled into yards of fabric
To clothe
Murders.

Body of evidence, Scene two

Displayed in heaps
Weathered soles
Leather strapped, and wooden carved shoes
Heels run over
Muddied, filthy, yet
Compulsively matched
Abandoned

Body of evidence, Scene Three

Piled as if left at the airport
Baggage Claim
Leather and cardboard luggage
Possessions, lettered white with hope
Franz, Herman, Elsa,
Lives in suitcases, latched shut
Forever

Body of evidence, Scene Four

Unanimated limbs
Legs, knees, feet
Crutches warped, twisted
Angle iron and wood
Custom fitted for ambulation
Stacked as debris.

Four dioramas stuffed full of human artifacts
As if left only yesterday, not decades ago.
Hope abandoned
Despair beats loud in my ears
My heart empties
I retreat
Down the long dim hallway

Outside, I refill with clean oxygen
My eyes search the sky for space
The horizon
A vista on which to pin
My reality

But
It continues

Body of evidence, Scene Five

The special executions
The Gray wall pocked marked with the ricochet of gunshot
Wood beams lined with hooks to hang hoodless ghosts
Airless cells that gasp misery.
So many bodies shot, hung, and stored
As a butcher’s store of red meat.

Body of evidence, Scene Six

Solid, cold, cement cubicles host
A front portico where
Naked feet gathered to file into
The bunker.

1.5 million noses
Inhale
3 million lungs
Gulp
Paralyzing gas

Body of evidence, Scene Seven

Parallel narrow iron rails
Direct themselves to small fireboxes to
Burn, extinguish, eliminate
Them
The ones who could not fill
The obsession
The ones who became fuel to
The obliteration
The ones, victims of
The fear that required
A final solution

Save the bits.
Bits who screamed and sang
Bits who cried and laughed
Bits who despaired and prayed
Bits who lost and loved

Ground bits
Remains