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The Haptics by Linda Dove

21st April 202221st April 2022  Linda Dove

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.

Artwork by Sara Rivers

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

Submissions are open from 6 January 2022 until April 2022.
For the full Call Out, click here.

Feature image: Photo by I.am_nah on Unsplash

Posted in Creative Writing, PoetryTagged: Haptics, Linda Dove, My Body's Bodies Editorial, Poetry, Sonnets

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