When it’s everywhere, you give up/ and what you once called pain,/you start to call yourself. – Fleda Brown, “The Devil’s Child”
I drag it around with me
I stow it in the pocket of my middle
Like I might need it later
Like my grandmother carries the Depression
In drawers full of sugar packets rubber bands
A marsupial who thinks pain
Is her baby tuck, tuck there, there I consume
Coffee like gasoline pills
With the most careful addict's math
Counting hours like a pharmacist...tick...tick
I feel it percolate
Or is it the caffeine
Or does the earth quake
The body learns to cringe inward
Translates pain
Memory like tripwire across
The kitchen my trigger son who is
Only autistic not actually
My father shouting brother mother
Pouring out life by the glass
A body can’t tell the difference
His face becomes other when he doesn’t
Like something there was always something to shrink from.
I’ve been guarding
Against so much my eyelids mimic it
In bed or in my soft chair my body
Sparkles like Christmas lights left leg upper left thigh a flutter
Not mine like a fetus right finger twitch
The whole hand sometimes, stop
In that last hour
Before sleep before the baby cries
Or the smoke detector detects nothing real
Faulty batteries faulty synapses
Before the cat yowls the alarm
Or the boy wanders out
Before my husband wakes hunching Into his clothes and I am afraid
Of the effort my heart makes
There is no quiet even in quiet except in that space
Where the house and the others are all at rest
And my body whispers to itself
... alert…... alert…... danger
... flinch.
I stow it in the pocket of my middle
I stow it in the pocket of my middle
I stow it in the pocket of my middle
Writing by SHANNON CONNOR WINWARD has appeared far and wide in places like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, The Pedestal Magazine, Lunch Ticket, Rogue Agent, Argot, The Monarch Review, Cider Press Review, Literary Mama, and Rivet: the journal of writing that takes risks. She is a Delaware Division of the Arts Emerging Artist Fellow and author of The Year of the Witch (Sycorax Press, 2018) and the Elgin-award winning chapbook Undoing Winter (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Shannon shares her body with chronic illness of the physical and mental persuasions, but her spirit is doing pretty well, all things considered. In between parenting, writing and other madness, Shannon edits Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal. Visit www.shannonconnorwinward.com.