Notes for The Handbook for the Newly Disabled
Chapter 1: After Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait,” Damaged by Acid in 1977
I.
A woman opens and closes window curtains inside the tight walls of her childhood
bedroom. A green orb explodes behind her clenched eyelids—chemical stars
packed into shells, propelled by gunpowder and flame. I can’t remember how I learned
to masturbate in this room, girl young and blue with fresh wanting.
Handle properly or risk serious injury, even death.
II.
My daughter clenches melting chocolate in her right hand, a wad
of yellow chrysanthemum trailing root and dirt in her left. She wears a pink leotard
and my black Jackie Os upside-down on her deep-sloped nose.
Mothers struggle with the crisp sunshine, with certainty. At 40, will my daughter
still walk? Understand the overflowing burden of tremor? I won’t live to see her.
III.
A young deer chases a blackbird in the empty lot beside the hospital
parking lot. I fucked a boy on a picnic table next to a pond one teen-drunk Saturday night.
I don’t remember his hands or name. The animal body is liquid. I’m supposed to feel
hopeful—as if some moments belong just to me. Remember how the mist
from peeled citrus saturates skin for days after you’ve swallowed its crisp pulp.
IV.
My postpartum depression wasn’t your fault and other apologies
I never spoke race in my liquid medicine guts. I want to mail you postcards
from the bedroom but we keep the stamps in the kitchen. As a girl, I spent my days
in dance class. That body still lives inside this body. You’re so much more flexible than I expected, says the physical therapist. I’m insulted.
V.
Imagine every body as a widow-maker heart, blue and pulsing, waiting for interrogation—
how pain speaks to legs or torsos or eyelids. What is left in my body to confess?
Hot iron, rack, pear, rats, boot, prod, chair, ice, shock, whip, thumbscrew,
rope. Perhaps the space around a body in pain matters more than the body
itself. I tell my son we only understand happiness because of death.
Chapter 2: Brain Fog
I.
Put the towel in the watermelon. Watermelon. Watermelon.
I have to Papa the laundry. Banana peel in the junk drawer, milk carton
with the coffee mugs, glasses in the hamper. I want to explain. Best
to stay silent. In the car, my mouth will speak any word
my eyes read on a billboard or street sign. Honey, I love insurance.
II.
Brain can’t say where pain lives. Mouth points
to the leg, hears lightning, says cold, smells a horse trample
across hips’ hilling landscape, down leg’s curling back.
Finger knows sadness walks pills down the esophagus, swears
at the children. Hold tight to your own speaking, your unattainable future.
III.
I tell my husband my face has gone yellow. You aren’t yellow. Don’t try
to imagine numb, color, dizzy. My face has gone yellow. Not dimmed
but switched—like yellow fat. I once knew so many words and most
of the orders. If you could see the color I slog through now—singing gray mud
and brown lung air—to find each one, you’d stop looking at me like that.
IV.
Silence breaks in my ears an hour after a pill like the silence of our bed
when my husband puts our baby down for the night—she was supposed to love me best.
I know now that the first dull, prickle-foot step I ever took was my child
wafting like scarves between my slow fingers. The pills make me shiver.
My ears fall to the ground, sprout green from invisible seeds.
V.
I was never taught how to wake with blue legs, smile through medicine skin. I’ll never
ride a bike again, hike, carry my children. I’m learning to number what I’ve lost.
Because of the pills, I no longer fall into sleep, I stop. I used to hate queer at 19
when I was a dyke. I can’t be disabled. I need a better word. I need a body that floats—translucent and liquid—to my daughter’s bed, to cover her like cotton-red quilted stars.
Chapter 3: White
. . . there is a peculiar emptiness about the color white. It is the emptiness of the white that is
more disturbing, than even the bloodiness of red. —Herman Melville
I.
After the birth of my daughter, every room yellowed,
every face yellow, and my own yellow hand couldn’t touch
any of the yellow slicked world, yellow as a light cut between my body
and every other body. Now every room is white and glowing, white
glows from our windows like something terrifying lifting from a field.
II.
I’m done, I tell my friend. We both remember how she contorted
as the doctor pulled the port from her chest, how chemo dripped thick
and red into her chest, and her white breasts—scooped from skin—how
we peeled back bandages to watch the empty skin flap against her stomach.
She once nursed her newborn son. I know I don’t have to explain.
III.
I think now that becoming queer was easy, as easy as forgetting
being born—petechiae on the forehead, purple stippled checks
and chest, fragments under new skin holding on to how it felt
to be embraced fully by another body. But a mother’s body contracts
as it must to save love from drowning.
IV.
Our doctor, who sits one row in front of us at church,
prescribed the pain pills. His face was so pink and embarrassed, I stopped
asking. I ask friends now. Embarrassing.
I take the pills anyway. I forget
everything three times before I remember.
V.
The white of wanting to die streams from my eyes, even the ceiling glows
white from my want. In the MRI machine, in the blood room—drawing,
spinning, labeling—in the hard chair, the papered bed metal needle liquid,
the light illuminates how my legs now crumble beneath me. When you read
your handbook for the newly disabled, you’ll want someone to hold you.
Chapter 4: How to Read My/Our/Their/Your Future in Scattered Bird Bones [with Photo Illustrations]
I.
Some pills are yellow. Some white. Some are blue, shake like plastic eggs—
grade school music class. Remember the carpet, thin-pilled and scuffed to strings
in every entryway? Imagine a woman’s body in sepia. Pills by the handful
mornings, afternoons, every night. Pills are meant to make toes and calves
and thighs feel less lead, less ice-rain drops, less phantom hair clinging, feel less.
II.
Accessibility Note:
Photo of a woman standing near a large body of water.
The woman thinks: What fish know about water is that the sky
is north, the ocean is south, and all of us are rushing home
against gravity. I could live as a fish. How beautiful
to never gasp at air like a bird, a kite, like fire diminished to kindling.
III.
Some treadmills work underwater. Did you know? Hydraulics lower and raise torsos
in water. With limp legs, torsos walk the water while the air above waits like a predator
to crush the stride from muscles. Be with me. Touch me. I can peel this soggy skin
off like a coat. A woman might say all this to a lover—tucked into a muscled torso, legs
braided, sweat behind knees—it feels so yellow to be pilled, I’m so tired of living and water.
IV.
Accessibility Note:
Photo 1: A group of middle-aged women: the women wear fashionable smiles,
hang brightly colored handbags from their elbow crooks, have terrible smoking habits
in their dreams. Photo 2: A young woman running in a field: brambles stick to her ankles.
Her face is blue blushed by motion. Birds lift, always lift, never land—
always mid-wing stroke up to glide.
V.
Some bodies are hot in the once-cold places. Cold. Hot again. Foot out of covers,
you can relate. A woman’s body does this in patchwork squares. Random
as a child’s light-up push button game. Red, red, blue, yellow, blue.
Red to blur your fingers. Green to tremor your eyes. How will I ever stop
writing illness? Intoxicating. This word is all the woman has to say.
Chapter 5: Signs
I.
The neon at Prairie Flower Bible Church blinks: Jesus is KING
Every Sunday on Jesus Name. Flags at half-staff again.
The Faith Makes a Family folks are at our door again.
Pumpkins rot on our porch, mouths collapse
into grimaces. Our daughter says brains look like pickles.
II.
I once kept a lover. She played the squeezebox
in the echo-quiet stairwell of our two story house. A softer sound lives now
like cedar and citrus in cast iron, the gray painted end table, plastic primary toys,
even our shirts and socks. Today, ice groans off tree limbs and eaves.
I imagine all my past lovers slip, shatter on rivering walkways.
III.
My son prays I will find him when he dies. I know better—
at this age—than to ask for signs. Pain lounges on my legs,
beautiful as something round and delicate inside a bowl of melted sugar spun
to glass. I swear, I’m glad I’m alive—breathing. Our baby wakes
each morning at 2:13. I’m alive in Missouri, glistening like a long reverberating moan.
IV.
A boy once held me down in his bed. His sour beer breath scratched
between my breasts. He caressed my hair, traced the swirls and bends.
Boys in the next room played The Clash. Imagine prairie-chickens.
Imagine their bodies slit from neck to belly and the gleam of their guts reflects
in your eyes like spit on mud, like a woman’s arms lifting in feathered flight.
V.
I am searching for a religious experience: atheist joins church, sobs
through every service, crowd radiates light like marbles from their eyes.
I am slack jawed. A fine and terrible line lives between
nothing about my body feels good and nothing—
like a CDC newsletter warning about gynecological cancers: inevitable.
Chapter 6: Five by Five
If you are confused, don’t worry. The Handbook for the Newly Disabled is also disabled and also the words, bodies pushed tight—five by five—into your world that can’t contain us.
Allison Blevins is the author of the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Her books Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2022) are forthcoming. Her collaborative chapbook Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021) is also forthcoming. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana. She lives in Missouri with her spouse and three children. For more information visit allisonblevins.com.