MAVIS STAPLES SAYS TO WRITE ABOUT MY BLESSINGS | Sarah Piper
(After Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals, Prompt. 289 Blessings by Mavis Staples)
I can’t explain it,
but if I eat chocolate
or hummus or a crumbing coconut cake
(or I suppose just by the invisible
and misspent hand of autoimmunity),
my eyes and mouth dry
to a desert and I wake up in the night
with eyelid sewn to eyeball
and for a moment
I wonder if eyeballs and teeth
and tongues can survive a desert; and for a moment
I think about the doctor’s advice to import moisture
from companies that manufacture an abundance of liquids
for parched patches of ungiving
mucosa. Hell—it once was my own advice,
doctor that I was, before I started dressing up
as a rebel in my own health.
Or I think I could stop—
the chocolate, the coconut, the chickpea feasts
of “let me just live this damn moment freely.” But I don’t stop,
or sometimes I do and then I start,
too, again. And I don’t always anticipate the drought
with methylcellulose tears from a squeeze bottle
and peppermint troches
laced with xylitol.
I don’t know the spirit of that.
So I think to myself
when the recriminations and catastrophes settle:
I’m going to turn on the faucet of my blessings.
I’m going to rewet my sandpaper body
with the memory of peeling the purple-tipped horns
of a garden artichoke, for the first time seeing
a new art revealed, or when
I crouched to pick up a fly
in its upended stillness and it buzzed impatiently
at me. Not yet, it said. There’s still more to go. Or the time
I opened my then-amply tearing eyes in a courtyard
next to god and was met, stare for stare,
by a tiny, brown bird that kept the company
of my grieving heart
for a full five minutes. Or the time
I moved outside an unmovable body
through empty space to touch the sleeping foreheads of my family,
thousands of miles away, to protect
from nighttime thieves; or when I learned to move
through time itself to hold my own face, hand to my own invisible tears,
at the moment illness had just become mine, and realized
there would never again be such a thing as alone, even if alone
feels like one of my own bones.
Sarah Piper is a writer and physician living in northern California. Her previous work can be read in the Kindling and in future Elevate issues of Yellow Arrow Journal.