Niina Pollari
There Is No Word
I wanted to write a true poem.
I started with a fact: she had soft hair. I know because I touched my chin to it when I held her.
The truth is that when I held her, neither of us cried.
A fetus passes its genetic material to its mother beginning at six weeks’ gestation. The mother carries it with her even when the fetus, now a child, parts from her body. She becomes a genetic chimera, feeling as if her children are with her even when they are not.
When I was a small child, I walked with my daycare provider across a street every day to a playground. Down the street there was a church whose roof was being leafed with bright copper. Later, the copper roof oxidized to a matte green. It surprised me because I didn’t understand yet that some changes are chemical, irreversible.
The truth is that inside a car, driving past a field where dusk almost touches the ground, sometimes you can see a shooting star as it burns green and falls. The copper of its body lights on fire as it enters this atmosphere. It is only visible for a short time, and then it’s gone.
I walk through the body of every day like an organism being born. Through the red gel and muck of the underbelly. Through all the female pain.
I say I walk but in truth there is no word for the locomotion that I do.
I Think That I Would Die
Just before I went under I felt my pulse speed up. I felt a sense of panic. The anesthesiologist repeated You feel a sense of panic, but he didn’t look at me while he was saying it. The baseline of my pulse rang out across the room, translated by a machine. A kaleidoscope of lights above my head was beautiful; it rearranged like reality every time I closed and reopened my eyes.
Just before I went under I had the most frightening thought I have ever had.
I can never tell you what it was.
There is nothing to be afraid of with anesthesia. You will be watched very closely while you are asleep. You will become the machines, the table, the air. You will feel no pain as they cut into your body.
The undertow is more powerful than anything.
Like a patient etherized upon a table: Eliot’s description of the sky.
In the nineties, my father had a girlfriend who was an anesthesiologist. Together they danced the foxtrot in her living room.
You see, just about anything can become familiar.
At A Reading Listening To A Poem About Motherhood
How are all these flowers always unfolding? Milk as an invention. A placid kind of darkness envelops you, and you exist in it as an ecosystem that sustains.
I am a hurt ecosystem. My baby is not present, so she must just be a metaphor. I'm present in the darkness too and it hurts my body. I'm trapped in the planet. The moon rolls around the sky like a peeled egg, and I shrink back as quickly as possible. There, nobody ever even knew I wanted to touch it.
But I wanted to hold it to my eye. There two are so alike, after all. Alone in the sky like that.
I wanted to sing to it, just a little. I was sure it could hear me.
Being in a room with other mothers is to my benefit and I take it like a prescription. It's good to realize my potential, my meaning in this life. I have to grow a third tit, and it is a ghost tit to feed my baby who is a metaphor.
You say "I would like to be a real friend to you" and I can't tell if you are my competition.
The darkness I am in is so full it's leaking. I have to catch it into a disposable pad I slip inside my bra. I erased the rage from this poem, but there is still rage in it. And so I failed again.
Megalophobia
I saw a satellite roll across the sky
A steady light much higher than a plane
I say saw instead of watched because I didn't go looking for it
Instead it entered the small window of my eyes
And I followed it as it bisected the pattern
That emerged from the blackness as my eyes adjusted
We were looking at the stars in early evening
In the Florida Keys
I lost the satellite but kept looking
The light pollution was low enough
For the scatterplot glow of the Milky Way to be visible
The horizon extended wide beyond the bridges
And the sky dragged the ocean like a dress
Stars rising from the hem of it
Like the pins in the metal cylinder
Of a music box mechanism
The sea was the comb
That plucked each pin as it rang
Against the emptiness of the universe
The ringing was not audible
It was in my recognition
It’s just something I feel
An enormity of feeling
Like the soft head of some beloved
What are you supposed to call the feeling
When you see a star and realize that it corresponds to a map
That it’s just one point in a huge map that extends over everything like an enormous dark skull
And then after a while the sky itself becomes overwhelming to you
Even though it’s a thing you live with every day
Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror
Says Rilke, someone who died
There are the dead and there are the living
And what do the dead have to tell us
They got out of here
They don’t have to do this
I am terrified all the time
I am filled with fear in the face of beautiful things
The most beautiful thing I ever saw has made me the most afraid
And the fear has never left me
I walk my days choosing cans at the market
I lay my nights listening to the cries of car alarms like melancholy dogs
And the fear still lives in me like a bead of mercury
Inscrutable mirrored and so very poisonous
And when I look up at the sky
I lose my sense of proportion
I forget where my edges are
I have the urge to sit down
And catalogue what I have
Here are my two hands
And my forehead with its headlamp
The basket of my ribcage holding its small bruised fruit
And here is my husband
Tender and freckled and warm in the dark
One hand around my waist
As the other points up
To the constellation Draco
Niina Pollari is the author of Dead Horse (Birds, LLC 2015) and the translator of Tytti Heikkinen’s The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal (Action Books 2012). Her most recent work is the split chapbook Total Mood Killer, written with merritt k and out from Tiger Bee Press.