print previewback MOLLY MCCULLY BROWN & SUSANNAH NEVISON
Post-Op Letters in the Field Between Us
Dear M——
Today I forgot what it was
I went looking for, my own face,
or the shape of something
I should love. I just watched
the leaves gather around my feet,
their small dead selves lighter
now, unselved. Perhaps this is
part of it, a willingness
to forget the way the world
has touched our bodies sharply,
so we can refill ourselves with
someone else: someone who
doesn’t start every time
she hears a distant saw, who doesn’t
feel her legs as wooden rot.
I want to be the kind of woman
who has one story and it’s a good one,
and it starts like this:
once, I was in the dark woods.
Here’s one version I know
instead: nothing ever happens
once. The woods are everywhere.
The woods are rife with men
and saws and knives.
Once, the trees were alive.
~
Dear S——
Today I started walking where the trees were alive,
still stitched to their leaves, still humming, still houses
for musky warm and wild things who out-breathed all
the men and all their knives. And yes, the woods were dark,
but nothing ever happens once, and so they didn’t stay
that way: the sun came up on all that had survived
and there I was, somehow among their number, still
dragging the same legs, still finding buckshot caught
behind my tendons, braced for new machines
I might hear readying to go to work on all my flesh.
S, it turns out we can last a long time with our legs
bent, make it for miles crawling on our hands.
A callus forms, we grow a shell. In curling downward
it is easier to press our ears right to the ground,
hear that, beneath it all, where leaves and marrow
wear down and wear out, there’s water running.
Once, the woods were something else.
~
Dear M——
There are so many ways
our faces are beyond recognition,
so many ways I’ve failed to see
myself in the world, or failed
to see the world in me,
though I’ve folded the woods
and the river into my arms, my chest,
so that I might be wrecked again,
so that I might be made
into another wild thing
the world forgets. I don’t think
we’ll ever recognize a place
as ours, as built for us, unless
it’s one we make out of the ashes
of the next best thing, a nest
that’s empty and shaped
by all the birds before us. Even
the raft wasn’t made for us,
but of us, our bodies unable
to carry themselves but made
to carry everything else. When
I open my hands, I’m never surprised
by the birds they turn into, how
quick they are to take a thing
apart to see what holds it up.
Take a little string, some straw,
a piece of bark. Whatever it is
we carry into each clearing,
let’s hold it up and squint
until it turns into a face we know,
a house we’ve loved, a wrecked
and empty nest, a place the birds
have made for someone else
then left.
~
Dear S——
The birds our hands become
are the ones with holes cut
in their cores so you can see
right through them to the world
they’re leaving into: little globe
of cloud, or rusted brush, or green held
steady there between their bones while
they go on building and unbuilding
their homes from what was there already,
unspooling the string and tearing through
the air like they are not torn through,
like what’s a wound was always
meant to be a window. I open my hands
and watch them work until they’re out of sight.
In one clearing, we settle down just for a night
with what the birds have left behind,
in another, our hands make an aperture
somebody sees the sky through.
~
Dear M——
If what’s a wound was always
meant to be a window, then say
my body’s shot with light, say
it’s me who does the looking, who
presses herself against the glassless
frame and waits for the riddled surfaces
to announce the versions of the body
I’ve been, and the ones I think I’ll become:
my mother’s perfect face
that mine doesn’t resemble, the idea
of a child I can’t see, and so imagine
I might keep. Say it’s me who
does the mapping, who names the river
and every gnarled tree, the places
that they reach. Say it’s me who
sees the whole of me blanch dry and white.
Say home is a shard of bone I pull
from the cracked riverbed, and say it’s me
who cracks the earth to put it back.
I know the map is wrong.
Someone else shoots me through
with light: an X-ray, a map I’m told
is clear and true. It’s someone else who
cracks me open too, who names the earth,
who says what shard or thing comes out,
what each becomes, which piece goes back.
~
Dear S——
At the bottom of the riverbed
the ground is dry as all the shards
of bone we buried and unburied there.
I puzzle skeletons together from
the bleached scraps we wrenched loose,
trying to make an animal of what
they left us with when it was over.
I know I’m glowing from the artificial
stars they pumped us bright with,
that the rivers in my wrists are running
violet before they calcify. I’m leaking light.
I stain the things I touch. I lie down
in what is just a canyon now and,
watching from above, they use my
growing constellations to map out
the world they’ve made: pin down
the North, my waning water, what’s
worth saving, how a good war spreads. 
Contributor’s notes: Molly McCully Brown
Contributor’s notes: Susannah Nevison