Glass Armonica

Poems

Rebecca Dunham

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781571319135
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The "exquisitely crafted poems" of this prize-winning collection weave together past and present to explore touch, trauma, and the female body (G.C. Waldrep). The eighteenth-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song—which was once thought to induce insanity—wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female "hysterics" and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud's famed patient Dora. Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited contact—of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric's "locked jaws." Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

GLASS ARMONICA

List of all I can recall: his hair,

red and curly; I was ten; how I slept

in the top bunk, in July heat;

his first name: Richard;

damp-swollen smell of pine

and unwashed clothes in the girls’

cabin; waking to his hand;

the camp director forbid the piercing

of each others’ ears — we’d catch

lockjaw — ; leg-stroke; fingers

against a sleeping bag’s clenched steel

seam; my friend Prue; the lawyer’s

call; our family room; my parents

asking me to tell them what I knew.

They asked us to tell them

the truth — there was proof — girls’

photos recovered from his trash;

our names and dates noted

meticulous in his little black book.

We were safe. But all of our jaws

were locked. We knew nothing

about all of that. Did not recall

those days in the infirmary,

Prue and I holding thermometer to

lightbulb, nor the inexplicable way

our eyes crossed and limbs shook.

The nurse never told. We were

homesick. We were good patients.

Mary Glover in London, 1602

I am sick, the doctors say, and offer

to count the ways. They call it

affliction of the uterus, the globus

hystericus. I call it ‘clod of cold

porridge lodged in the throat.’ I call it

the devil and no tight lacing or

birdseed diet can exorcise that grip.

I name my tormentor, and though

I cannot speak, still the voice box tics

and creaks: Hange, Hange —

I turn round as a whoope, heade back

to hippes. They testify to the womb’s

wandering. How it constricts. Dear sirs,

don’t you think I’d know it if it did?

Don’t kid yourself. You don’t know

what crouches, seething, under

lock and key. An infestation:

a dozen for every one you see, hiding,

tunneling — I was ten.

Prue’s mother insisted she could hear

them chewing. They opened

the wall to a colony of carpenter ants

frothing in bulbous-black ropes.

Myrmecophobia: fear of ants. Due, I am

told, to another memory I do not

recall: an explosion of tiny ants rivering

my hands when I snapped

the doll’s head free from her neck.

— for Prue

You’re a doll, her father says. She is

helpful, she smiles, she is not

bound for the doll hospital. Moors

ball-jointed limbs into place. Ask

not what nests inside her head,

dried apple balanced

on an effigy’s stuffed rag-flesh.

She cannot say. She casts spells

upon herself, a child’s poppet

pierced by pins. Here.

And here. The therapist lays the naked

doll in her hands. Where?

he asks. She schools her face.

Was it here? Or here? Or here?

Augustine, at the Salpêtrière, 1875

There, there, Charcot presses, oh dear

love, dear Augustine. I belong to his

unique body of cure: 1) of ether:

“That’s how you make babies,” he says

I say, as I gently sway legs and pelvis;

2) of tuning fork: I speak of men

as beasts like big rats and when they

speak, flames emerge from their mouths.

The photographer catches it —

How my physiognomy expresses regret . . .

Abundant vaginal secretion. Speculum,

a doctor pushing his long needle into

my exposed neck, and how I smile

for the camera, a knowing smile (he says).

. . . the girls know things — flash’s

blink — eclipse on an eyelid’s

convex screen — they buried

the bodies out back, stiff

limbed — his images stacked

and shuffled like a flipbook

in the prosecutor’s h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Rebecca
• Ubi Sunt
• A Frightful Release
• Stricken
• Hemispherectomy
• GLASS ARMONICA
• The Garden of Earthly Delights
• Is Pear :: Is
• My Life as Narrated by Another
• Melancholia as Invasive Species
• Pill
• SELF-PORTRAIT AS GALLERY
• Lines Written on the Margin of My Book
• Learning to Pray
• House-Tree-Person
• Self-Portrait as Triptych
• To Winter
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author