Twentieth Anniversary of Being Stabbed While Being Mugged
When the knife went in and what came out was blood, too much—
For twenty years I ignored the scars on my hand and shoulder, where the knife had found me pliant, unprotected. Instead I thought about the dual and opposing meanings of cleave. The cleaver in his hand left me cleft, the doctor of trauma cleaved me together again, a roughened and reddened facsimile of what I was before, but at least I was no longer bleeding, at least I can still wiggle most of my fingers.
When I was in college, my roommate, a dancer, colored every night in her anatomy textbook. I didn’t think about my hands back then. I was whole. I was not overwhelmed by knowledge of metacarpals, ligaments, and tendons—perhaps I should have taken anatomy, too—I never quite understood how the doctors put me back together again, it seemed some kind of hocus-pocus—
a phrase which likely derives from the Latin hoc est corpus, the old dead words of Jesus repeated every Sunday: This is my body. This is what I mean by deflection, by loss of faith: collapsed on that dirty city sidewalk, cleaved to the bone, screaming for help as he ran off with my wallet. I could see options, omniscient like a broken, fallen god: I might live one-handed, or I might sweat and weep through three surgeries, nine months of physical therapy—
and that’s the road I eventually took, a stitched-up pilgrimage, changing the bandages, willing my befuddled fingers to bend like they used to, to lift pennies from a tabletop, to curl around a pencil—but first, before all that, still bleeding out on the sidewalk, somewhere deep in me the future cleaved again and I saw another option: close my eyes, give up the ghost of my barely lived life, finally rise toward something embarrassing and old-fashioned and longed-for, like salvation—
but strangers came running, called 911, an ambulance carried me over a river, into a hospital, surgeries and bandages and therapy passed, and then, eventually, my flesh opened again, and once again, my glad submissions, my babies lifted from my belly, another miracle of modern medicine, and I would never embarrass my kids by telling them this, but sometimes, when I sit on the porch and watch them in the yard, running, jumping, tossing a ball
back and forth between their waiting hands, I think—this is my body—
Ode to / Elegy for My Skin
Pity this flesh as it implores the dark earth to reveal its pretty secrets: minerals that will soften me toward immortal, salt that will scrub this dusty and ransacked cathedral clean. My skin longs for what is past and holy—o, regal sheen of youth!—but I never said my prayers and now here I am with my constant surface sorrow, recalling the easy carrying before the time of scar and stretch, knife and tear—the days threaten to topple, I can’t hold them all fast in my loosening grip. Remember, someone, this everyday skin turned slackline, sagging toward extinction, yet still electric underneath, endless blood pulsing unseen, red ocean depths—all this too is held, is carried clean. I’ve been granted this soft safety, porous, durable, a vital protection throughout the process— say I keep it cleansed, moisturized, sweetly buttered, oiled bright, stitched across the ages of detachment, of oblivion, what might—
Kristen Holt-Browning is the author of the novel Ordinary Devotion (Monkfish Book Publishing), the poetry chapbook The Only Animal Awake in the House (Moonstone Press), and the forthcoming poetry collection Watershed (Fernwood Press). Her writing has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State, where she works as a freelance editor. Learn more at http://www.kristenholt-browning.com or on Instagram (@theholtbrowning).
