she asks the ages of my children

(one day apart and six years

something to talk about while their fingers are inside me)

The funny thing is, I wasn’t actually sick when I let doctors make a hole in me and take something away. Minor surgery, of the sort on reality shows, and so I was awake for the procedure. Let me say, does surrealism ever make a heck of a lot more sense. Speaking with someone who’s in the midst of prying open your skin is a singular experience, and one that evokes more body horror than I like on a Monday morning.

And I’d just posted that poem On Convalescence, not considering the fact that I was about to experience it.  I was mainly thinking of an essay by Woolf, quoted in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose as an example of a perfectly valid run-on sentence.  Writing on illness, on its relative absence from the novels of her time despite all the ways that sickness and recovery impinge on our psychic and physical selves, Woolf’s rambling thoughts follow an indirect path ending at ourselves, the first and last locus of one’s consciousness, the very place where one experiences illness and convalescence.

I wasn’t sick. I was only on holiday (see below), but I have the work ethic of a consumptive viscount and a moral opposition to hustle culture, so I haven’t obliged myself to post much of anything in the last two weeks.  Add to that being still in a bit of a cocoon from my peculiar spring and from two years of you-know-what, and y’all going to have to bear with me.