I S S U E 6
Victoria Kennefick
Hedgehog Practises Being a Girl
I try to jump the stream
in leg warmers that grab
the attention of every bramble
on the climb up that hill.
Tangled, too slow,
I trip over slender water
you cleared in one
magnificent deer-leap
to fall flat at your feet.
I shut my eyes
as if you will not see
my embarrassment
of ripped leggings,
exposed knicker elastic,
stripes of wet mascara
splitting my face.
My boots, so lately pristine,
two mucky drunks huddling
to my chest in a nest of reeds
and thorns, already dreaming
of the night before.
I curl, hunch my back
into natural roundness
feel them emerge, shove through skin,
paper-thin, I can’t help it—
my spikes, my spikes pop
the silence, now shred fabric while you stand
over me, mouthing like a fish,
we were just going for a walk!
Then pulling me to my feet, you guide me
back the way we came, all pins
and needles. Once over the gate,
safe on asphalt, my face hot
and drizzly, you laugh
and laugh when I confess
a deep abiding love for paths.
Mastication Resolution
The beginning is an elastic band stretched around your wrist—
the colour of dead flesh and chewy under-cooked pasta.
Feel it there, all the time, cutting into your skin so
where the band rests, blood aches to get through, and your head—
you haven’t eaten or had one bad thought since—
The beginning was an elastic band, it always is, bound around something,
one to ping, to remind yourself to remember not to be something or not to do
something or to do something (it can get confusing).
The beginning is an elastic band stretched around your wrist—
snap it when you let yourself down, when you eat Chinese alone in the dark,
when you spoon crunchy peanut butter into your mouth as if it will save you—
Good for you, you student dinner, you 11:30pm-showing-at-the-cinema carpet,
you hanging hem, you laddered opaque, you saggy legging, you 1,457 unread emails,
you custard skin, you chipped nail.
The beginning is the word, the word is air, you eat food like air,
air like food, never masticate, never take your sweet jaw-time to grind
the good into something you can digest, it’s all about the gulp.
The beginning is the beginning; a beginning because time is elastic
apparently, though it doesn’t feel like that, hurtling towards space
as you are, taking it all up, a sausage in a skirt, trying to be something—
Good for you, you fish-smell in the canteen, you bunch of lost-button thread
on a crummy lapel, you un-popped corn kernel, you fuzzy fridge-yogurt,
you crusty three-day sock, you bloated pouch,
you used tampon, you woman.
The beginning and the end is an elastic band taut around your wrist.
You look at it often, it makes you feel less messy, your body
organised. Better brush your teeth, drink the icy water. Suck it in.
They comment on how well you look, though your hand’s turned blue—for god’s sake
bite it off, girl—chew.
Day 27
In the Town Park the roses
are starting to die, thank God.
I sit on a splintered bench,
pick holes
in myself,
pulling a snag on my tights
so it gapes open—
a terrible mouth.
A garment,
I want to be altered
taken in
taken up
hemmed instead
of all this
emptying &
filling.
I count out my life
in the moon’s flat faces,
then start again.
Wait
brain-hot, an empty oven
left on,
I bite
my nails,
tearing at small
arcs
with sharpened teeth;
bare them at dogs
who whimper past—
cowards!
Leave me alone—
rigid in this grey garden
until it rushes in
crimson
&
all around
singed petals
fall
like tongues.
NOTE
‘Shame is a soul eating emotion,’ this phrase by Jung is one I think of often. It makes me
uncomfortable; it makes me itch. My relationship with shame has always been tied to my
body, or rather my perception of my body as a source of embarrassment and guilt—the locus of shame. When I read again the poems published here my face reddens in recognition of the fact that each of these poems presents a different face of shame. The speaker in ‘Hedgehog’ tries to be something she is not, outdoorsy, robust, resilient in the face of physical challenge, though she attempts to look the part with disastrous, but retrospectively hilarious, consequences, wearing ‘leg warmers’ of all things. In ‘Mastication Resolution’ the speaker struggles with the weight of her physical body—the space it takes up, how unruly it is and how desperately she tries to control it, often at the expense of contentment, which is an enemy of perfectionists. And then ‘Day 27’ confronts those difficult, trying days before menstruation when many who have periods suffer, often embarrassed and confused about the rollercoaster of emotions their body puts them through. Why can’t it just behave? Why can’t it be like . . . like what?
Shame and suffering are sisters. They walk hand-in-hand blazing through our lives, our relationships, our sense of self, blushing our cheeks and causing us to turn ever more inward. Indeed, scientific research links shame with the physiological urge for self-protection: the experience of shame employs the identical brain circuits that push people to hide from physical danger. That feels right, doesn’t it? That at the exact moment shame is triggered, we are emotionally hijacked, and there’s no prefrontal activity. We want to be anonymous and invisible. How often I have wished to hide like this, to fold in on myself like a cotton sheet, to be put away. That specific type of stress, the automatic desire to vanish, can trigger immediate and long-term biological changes, often associated with a fear response. We know intimately how this feeling can lead to a sunken body posture, the physical expression of wanting to disappear.
It is in this posture of shame, bent over like a broken broom, I write. And as I write, I force myself to lift my head, to confront this hot, sharp emotion, so powerful, so devastating. I don’t know what I expect to see, but it is always my own face looking back at me. I write to it and through it, this feeling, and find its grip loosen as I share the truth of my body, the only one I have, with myself, with the readers who’ll happen upon my poems. With you. And in doing so, and in writing the poems for my first collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, 2021), I free myself a little from it.
What I have realised in this confrontation—of looking at myself in shame through my poems—is that the core, the nub, of the shame is that I have a woman’s body, like so many of us do, and that I have been led to believe by poetry, by writing, by the media, by politicians, by institutional religion, that this is a problem. I have internalised the message that my body is messy, unruly, disgusting, that I shouldn’t talk about its cycles, its smells, its sufferings, but rather tuck it all away, fold it all up and get on with the process of pretending my body is a man’s body. Keep the truth of it secret. Hide in shame. Make everyone else’s lives easier. No, say my poems. No. No. No. So I unfurl myself and all my gory detail on the page and I rage and I rage and in so doing, I eat the shame up in one big gulp.
Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut collection Eat or We Both Starve was published by Carcanet earlier this year.
‘Hedgehog Practises Being a Girl’, ‘Mastication Resolution’, and ‘Day 27’ appear in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Poetry Birmingham; you can buy the issue here.