Posted 12/30
I haven’t yet mentioned that they moved my belly button.
Actually they didn’t move it; they took it off and moved everything around it, and then they sewed it back into the exact spot I’d point if someone were to ask where my belly button is.
Like asking a toddler where her ears are, her mouth, her face.
Like stealing her nose on Christmas morning. The rose of your thumb between your fingers.
Like asking the dog where her bone is.
Though no one asks where my belly button is.
I wonder why it wasn’t tossed with the other scraps.
In this way, just after the solstice, most everything began feeling arbitrary.
The ice cubes flushed down the toilet, a spoon stuck under a pillow.
Mama Heaton’s gall bladder in a pink plastic bucket; that kid from seventh grade’s spleen.
The buttermilk poured on my stepmother’s bread.
The alphabet, the weather, the yellow stars scratched into your skin.
That paper donkey with so many tails where a tail shouldn’t be.
I’m not sure what to say about the balloons tangled in the gumball tree.
The fibrous forest. Another vial of drawn blood.
I doubt I could pick my body from a line up.
For weeks, I felt like I was dragging a sour dish towel beneath my brain.
That one, I’d say to the lineup officer, the one with the lemons, the one that reeks of this morning’s milk, last night’s lamb juice, the raw food I sneak to the dog.
In the beginning, there was a body.
Then, the incinerated parts, the parts that washed down the drain, the parts that were useless but still salvaged, the parts that no longer served any use.
If you say belly button over and over, it’ll start to sound like something else.
Like saying hydrangea until it becomes a bomb.
The as if of the blossom, the as if of the body’s parts.
The as if of.
I dreamed my mother and I were on the beach, and she was mumbling, like a bad connection, like she didn’t have enough bars, and I was like, mom, I can’t understand a word you’re saying, but then I realized it wasn’t her it was me. My ears couldn’t make out sounds.
And as if of. Also, the waves.
Also, the fear of never being desired again, of never desiring, of saying desire so many times it becomes dire.
But maybe it’s like the months, how saying March over and over will make it April, how it’s December, and I’m watching the wipers of warm August rain on my dirty windshield, how it’s finally February, and I’m imagining another June.
As if, after a while, the bomb becomes bloom again, which I say over and over until it becomes moon, which I say and say until I’m blue in the face.
But I don’t want to be blue in the face, do you?
“The As is Of” 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:
