IN THE TIME OF GLASS CAPTIVES
Days were measured in indices of refraction. I woke with a fever and, inexplicably, bleeding toes, as though I had been dancing. An ocean of sweat, its tendrils the sheets. I ran a cold shower. Days were measured in millimeters thick. It started with a watchtower, a bottomless brunch, a discussion of Guantanamo Bay. Around me, people were eating and regurgitating and so I did the same. They spoke of faceless men, palm trees, salt flats. Days were measured in relative efficiency. They piled their plates high and I thought of Kilimanjaro. I excused myself to the bathroom, sweaty and hotcold. When I looked in the mirror, I had a fly’s thousandfold eyes, each surface its own wide and wriggling creature. In the time of glass captives, days were measured in ghosts, in depth of stomach, in eighty-five seconds to midnight. Back at the table, Guantanamo was old news. They were discussing sponsorships and calling for more mimosas. I saw peristalsis thousandfold, villi swaying tirelessly like kelp forests. Like a snake, something in me unhinged its jaw for more.
*
MANY SMALL CRESCENDOS
I was born with my eyes wide open, milky and dark, or so the story goes. In this way, I took the minutes. I bet on black. They shot her in the middle of a busy street, the sun washing its chyme out of her hair, touching her mouth like it intended to climb inside. She spoke charitably about it afterwards: I would tell young girls to follow their dreams, that you can do anything you set your mind to. Magnified and scraping the sky, lips parted. There were clothes, but there weren’t. There were faces, but not really. The next day I went to the body shop. Really, I didn’t know better. I wanted to see it for myself: whose hand, whose cheek, whose swath of knee, which small crescendos went where. They shimmered in the low light. Some of them grew legs. In that moment, it was just somebody’s horrifying basement, some collagist gifting my face to a new naked body. My same forehead. My new hands. It was the same but it was different. Every day the same liver, every night a new vulture. It was a thunderstorm stealing my face, she said, rolling over my body. But it wasn’t real, and anyway, it happens to everyone. You get over it; you move on. This was the radio on a Sunday afternoon, while I was washing the sun’s vomit out of my favorite skin. Supposedly they shot her on a balcony, back to the stars, Venus peeking out from behind her neck like an earring. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. In this way, I took note. I bet on black. The Milky Way beheld us wide open, or so the story goes. I wouldn’t know; I closed my eyes.
*
PULMONARY EMBOLISM
How a bubble in a hose can kill the diver to whom it rushes
To deliver its gifts. How sometimes pain is mistaken
For progress. How I, thinking I would not wake, woke—
Flushed with cold and pressed to a stranger, who said,
With no mouth, you could have died. I chose to take it
As a welcome back, then changed my mind and went with
A simple hello. Until then, I’d had recurring dreams about
This waking up. The curious business of being rearranged
With my eyes closed, like a repeated loser of the shell game,
Never guessing which one hides the stone. It seemed too
Simple to be true—I lived, and so I won—when really,
I’d guessed wrong again and had no idea where the stone
Had hidden itself away. It was too soon to tell, they said,
Whether it was in fact out of my lungs, or whether it was
Giggling somewhere I’d forgotten to check, a hidey-hole
I’d thought was out-of-bounds. I had recurring dreams
About guessing wrong again, though at each moment
You were there to find the right shell, squirreled away.
Oh, love. How I’d laughed with you, felt the air shoot
Up and out, bellies pressed together like rounded drums
When meanwhile, up north, that stray dog in all its
Ravenous beauty scavenged for the most comfortable
Front porch it could find, and my lungs, ever the hosts,
Opened the back door wide.
*
THE TESTAMENT OF ANARCHA
I
Shuffled first by my boy—at least I thought
he was a boy, because I once heard
that boys sit higher up—he shuffled me then ran,
giggling, to some light-dark place I knew
I could not follow. After the second day of pushing,
they whispered, she might die, and I thought, good.
I could hold his hand on the way there.
Maybe there would be music.
Shuffled a second time by the doctor,
though he looked more like a grave-robber
to me. Couldn’t imagine what he was possibly doing
except robbing the grave of my grave.
Didn’t stop the blood or the whatever else,
but may have made something entirely new.
Not a child but a monster. He said
you are loathsome, disgusting.
The girls whispered—they said this monster
has thirty faces and all of them are cold
with metal teeth here to chew me up
from the inside. The girls held me down.
I was shuffled twenty-nine more times
and they held my shoulders, my hair,
stuffed a sand-white rag between my teeth
so that I could not speak or scream.
Was it normal? To sweat this much?
Was it normal not to know four years had passed
and yet know I was still loathsome, disgusting?
Littered with debris like some stray animal,
I had long ago accepted that this was hell.
Some days I was a tilled field,
others an axed tree. Often I was the moon,
waiting to be plucked from the sky
by the next steel trap. The girls were all my age.
Sometimes I wondered if their sons ever giggled at them
from behind a light-dark veil every night.
Though we weren’t friends, they wiped my sweat.
Sometimes they cupped my face, like mothers.
II
I woke engulfed in tongues of sand, swathed
carefully like a newborn. There was music.
A hundred hands touching me—not to stuff rags between
my lips, but to gently carry away the sobs and spit
born there. An old woman lay on my left, a stranger
whose name I somehow knew, her brown skin sagging
and flaking from its home like paper. She held my hand.
The women whisper-chatted amongst themselves,
breasts all bared like new mothers who had forgotten
their shame. They helped me to my feet, bathed
me in the surf until I stopped saying loathsome, disgusting,
until I forgot the shape of the words in my mouth.
There was music. There were hands in my hair,
teasing it into shapes. I thought there would be fire, I said.
The women laughed, as a bird laughs when staring down a rifle:
as though carrying the knowledge that only a chosen few are blessed
with flight. I had no pain, and whether or not I had scars
didn’t seem to matter. My dead skin snowed off in sheets
below the buttery and unplucked moon. I did not tell them
that I had met the Devil, the endless hollowings,
the deaths of all I’d never owned. I didn’t have to.
They already knew. When I held still, there was music.
*
~ Author’s Notes ~
“In the Time of Glass Captives” is after Evan Antonakes’ “Crack”.
“Many Small Crescendoes” is dedicated to the increasing number of women who, due to advances in artificial intelligence, have had their face and likeness used without their consent. AI pornography is a deeply violating reality. Like other concerns addressed in this collection, it robs people of ownership over their bodies.
“The Testament of Anarcha” pays homage to Anarcha, a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl who underwent over thirty gynecological surgeries without anaesthesia to treat her vaginal fistula and to serve as a test subject for research in the field. Her tormentor, J. Marion Sims, is still honored today as the “father of gynecology”. In his autobiography, he repeatedly describes her body as “loathsome” and “disgusting”.
*
Leila Abeni Jackson is a proud DC native and a Pushcart-nominated Harvard undergraduate studying English and History of Science. Her work appears in the Harvard Advocate, Rattle, Sixteen Rivers Press, and elsewhere. She is the former poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate and her most recent work includes her senior thesis, Uncharted Song, a poetry collection which explores Blackness and the medical body through time.
