Posted 03/03
The room downstairs was in need of a good cleaning, but it was my room; or perhaps because it was my room, it was in need of a good cleaning. Not that I had dragged in dirt from the garden, but that I was shedding the outermost membrane of my skin. In 2011, the same year I lost one pregnancy and found my last, Charles Weschler and his colleagues explained that humans shed their entire outer layer of skin every 2-4 weeks. This seems counter to the seven years I learned in grade school when my second favorite joke was your epidermis is showing. But yes, since I began these sentences, I’ve likely shed .009 ounces of skin, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but line by line, it adds up, and so by the time my husband visits my downstairs room, he might drag his finger across the dust of my desk and ask how I can live this way. I am living, yes? And this way. The scientific term is desquamation, from the Latin desquamare, meaning “to scrape the scales off a fish.” Each summer, comes a morning, when walking to the river, I discover a number of dead fish have washed up onto the bank, and I’m startled, a hook in my heart, and each summer, on that morning, I promise myself I will not be startled again. I will not be startled again. O dust. I am not the same woman who began this poem.
“Desquamation” is a poem from the collection Everything is Temporary by Artist-in-Residence, Nicole Callihan.
On September 29, 2020, Nicole Callihan was diagnosed with breast cancer. A double mastectomy, a lymph node dissection, radiation, and hormone therapy followed. All the while, she committed to her everyday practice of making art. Many of the recordings were originally posted to the weekly open-mic series, Wednesday Night Poetry; the images that accompany the poems were selected from her Instagram collection @thebluepitcher. These are poems and notes she took in the months that followed her diagnosis.
Listen to Nicole Callihan read her poem here:
