Kate Gleason is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Measuring the Dark (selected by Phillis Levin as the winner of the First Book Award at Zone 3 Press), and three chapbooks, most recently Reading Darwin While My Father Dies (forthcoming from Anabiosis Press). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, Rattle, Sonora Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Boomer Girls, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received writing fellowships from the NEA (in conjunction with the Ragdale Foundation artist colony), the Vermont Studio Center, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.---------
PTSD
What happens in the amygdala stays in the amygdala
long after the trauma has passed,
childhood’s black box still emitting its signal
from the old reptilian sector of the brain, where fear’s yellow
almond-shaped eye nightly lowers its transparent second lid,
keeping watch even as it sleeps.
It’s exhausting, the fight-or-flight response of the involuntary
nervous system: your extremities suddenly flooded
with blood, your heart clanging its clapperless bell,
everything so real it’s dreamlike. Why don’t we call it
fight and flight, my running away as a girl a weapon
I deployed but hoped that someone would decode its message
like the lines I once cut into my arms, trying to let something
from the inside out, a row of x’s: a word written under erasure.
The Monster’s Bride Speaks (Roughly Two Centuries after Dr. Frankenstein
Destroyed Her Unfinished Form)
I can’t call what he did, on any scale,
right, but he took from me nothing
I needed in the long run. Maybe the guy
even did me a favor, sparing me the life
I’d have known as a woman, cultivated
to keep splitting off from myself
till I seemed no more than a labyrinth
to wander in, lost,
never to find the center, a life as fragmented
as my skin had been, like a mirror
someone cracked and pieced back together.
If I had to choose, I’d have to say
I’ve heard of worse states than the one
in which I find myself now, loosely occupying
a place that can’t quite be called
the afterlife. (How is it “after” when I feel
like I have always already been here?
And “life,” in my case, is even more problematic,
depending on if you mark it
as beginning at birth or conception.)
Still, it makes me sad to think
the world once contained someone else like me,
one other with a corresponding ache,
and that maybe I would’ve found him.
And what was to stop him
from finding in me a person
equally attractive, not in the least
put off if my weight was a scandal,
my walk awkward and albatross-gawky,
my hair impossible, unable to stay put,
all fly-away with the static
from built-up friction? It saddens me to think
what my life might’ve been like
if the first person to see me
hadn’t retched with dread, his gut threatening
to come up on him again
when he thought of my lips forming
too unnatural a line
or my body producing what
God only knew, if somehow my construction
had gone otherwise.