In these five lush, beautifully written sonnets, Linda Dove explores the intricacies of touch – our need for it, our dismissal of it, and our changing senses in a world where our hands are becoming “unused things, frayed thread, dull knife”.
i.
I try to remember if we’ve touched
inadvertently, brushed a sleeve going by
in a narrow hall, passed something
between us more substantial than a glance
or a wish. I think about touch now
as an object, as if we could have collected
touches in a jar or kept them like birds
behind glass. What happens to flight
when wings are stitched shut?
To trust that our skin might turn to sky
may also be a form of preservation.
It is like when flying happens in dreams,
when we learn to love the improbable
because we find ourselves in air,
falling.
ii.
When I’m lonely, the undressed house
dissolves my body to a scrap
of pink camellia through the window.
What if we forget how to touch?
Now we stare through screens, store
luck like the fourth leaf of a green
weed that used to exist underfoot
when our fingers might have found
each other in air. I wander the rooms,
one sense becomes another, tongue-texts,
eye-buds. If only I could use my hands
to wrap up my hands and send them,
if you could untissue them, unribbon
my wrists, open my fingers, press palm
to palm, hold them against you.
iii.
The things we won’t get back feel like stones
dropped down a well, the long release
of a private thought. Touch is the space
between air and water, all the dark
time it takes for a hand to withdraw.
We keep to ourselves, quilt together
squares of our lives by sliding our fingers
over the skin of phones. Our hands
become like unused things, frayed thread,
dull knife. We don’t remember our bodies
beneath us. All the days we could have been
will stack up under floorboards, as if we hid
keepsakes and forgot them, as if
we stuffed the walls with an interior life
we don’t know is there.
iv.
Stone hits water and displaces
an amount equal to the stone. Wait.
It will return. That is the great mystery
of any body, how it will fight to preserve
itself. In the holy book of little yellow birds,
there is a song. The notes add up
to flight. When you leave, it is because
you fear you won’t survive the ground.
The fear is right. The stone, the bird,
they sink in disbelief. They lie
where they fall, in love or from the sky.
They cover up. And the hand that released
them—let go the stone, freed the wing—
is the hand that tries to write, to lay
down the words you want to erase.
v.
The love language of rocks is gravity
the way they lean in, a nose here, a lip
there, an eye etched in stone.
In the event of a fire, there is grave talk
of what to save, how to empty
a house. We will carry as much
as we can. It does not seem possible
that we end up unable to hold on.
What does it mean to lose touch? Surely,
we are not in want of hands. There are
too many of them, too much body
scavenging for another body. What is left
at the end of everything?—granite faces,
the heat of the day preserved
in their skin, the turn from meaning.
About Linda Dove
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet of four books: In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019), as well as the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in the hills just east of Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.
This piece was submitted as part of our latest mini-series, Our Body’s Bodies
Everything is written on the body – but what does it mean to write about our bodies in the era of Covid-19? And is it possible to write about bodily experiences in the face of such pervasive and continued violence? Using different modes of writing and art making, Lucy Writers presents a miniseries featuring creatives whose work, ideas and personal experiences explore embodiment, bodily agency, the liberties imposed on, taken with, or found in our bodies. Beginning from a position of multiplicity and intersectionality, our contributors explore their body’s bodies and the languages – visual, linguistic, aural, performance-based and otherwise – that have enabled them to express and reclaim different forms of (dis)embodiment in the last two years. Starting with the body(s), but going outwards to connect with encounters that (dis)connect us from the bodies of others – illness, accessibility, gender, race and class, work, and political and legal precedents and movements – Our Body’s Bodies seeks to shine a light on what we corporally share, as much as what we individually hold true to.
Bringing together work by artistic duo Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie and Ben Caro, poet Emily Swettenham, writer and poet Elodie Rose Barnes, author Ayo Deforge, writer and researcher Georgia Poplett, writer and poet Rojbîn Arjen Yigit, writer and researcher Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou and many others, as well as interviews with and reviews of work by Elinor Cleghorn, Lucia Osbourne Crowley and Alice Hattrick, Lucy Writers brings together individual stories of what our bodies have endured, carried, suffered, surpassed, craved and even enjoyed, because…these bodies are my body; we are a many bodied being. Touch this one, you move them all, our bodies’ body.
We also welcome pitches and contributions from writers, artists, film-makers and researchers outside of the Lucy Writers’ community. Please enquire for book reviews too.
For submissions relating to trans and non-binary culture email dytorfrankie@gmail.com
For poetry submissions email elodierosebarnes@gmail.com
For reviews, prose submissions, artwork and general enquiries email hannah.hutchings-georgiou.16@ucl.ac.uk
