By Flapper Press Poetry Café:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café continues to support poets from around the globe and takes great pride in featuring their new work. We continue our new series called Poetry Spotlight in which poets are invited to entice readers with a look into their latest work along with some of the poet's insight, inspirations, and their favorite lines of poetry from their books.
We invite you to submit a poem and a favorite line from the work for the Poetry Spotlight series, or submit your poetry and writing to Flapper Press via our regular Submission Guidelines!
This week, we feature the poetry of Angela Carole Brown and her new book, Viscera.
Angela Carole Brown has published several books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including her North Street Book Prize–winning novel Trading Fours (2018). Shorter works appear in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Brilliant Corners, Flapper Press, Thorny Locust, and the poetry anthology In the Black/In the Red. Her illustrated film short, The Richest Girl in the World, won Best Multimedia Film at the 2021–22 Buddha International Film Festival and the Indo Global International Film Festival.
Between Skin and Bone
I lost my left nipple in a surgery that went wrong.
Now I constantly finger the scar that has taken its place.
I could probably get a job in fetish porn.
I lost my left kidney in a surgery that went right.
Now I constantly finger the 4 laparoscopic dots on the left
side of my stomach that have formed a horseshoe
that changes shape every time I gain-&-lose 20 pounds.
I am a map of scars, a highland landscape of corporeal Braille
that my curious index finger cannot seem to leave alone. There
are days when I wear the scars like trophies, but far more days
when I plot my next tatts to camouflage them. Purists of the form
scoff at the idea of hiding one’s bodily imperfections with a
tattoo: “Ink for expression’s sake, not from shame.”
I got my first tatt shortly after the transplant. Marking the triumph.
It’s a beautifully detailed Marquesan-style tribal that is
gradually crawling up the left arm.
Everything in my life seems to occur on the left.
Hans followed his first-ever shortly after me, but has, by now,
far surpassed me in the Great Tattoo Race, as he navigates
the precarious terrain of morbidity and survival
from the newly rejecting organ, and
I am just trying to love my flesh somehow.
Between skin and bone there lies a hint of where we come from,
and who emerges to take on this life. We gather our pieces
and build from there. We adjust the volume and tweak the
contrast. Sometimes we baptize it with ink. We sully our knees
to find support from the cosmos, and outstretch our hands
to make connection. And we breathe.
As plot would have it, not a single one of my tatts touches
any of my scars. Turns out the purists might actually
have something there. I seem to have grown quite in love
with this hypertrophic body art of mine, born not from
a desire to express myself in ink, but out of a handful of dirty
dogfights for somebody’s right to keep breathing.
My favorite line from “Between Skin and Bone”:
“I am a map of scars, a highland landscape of corporeal Braille that my curious index finger cannot seem to leave alone.”
From Angela Carole Brown:
The sense of wonder and awe within the landscape of the dogfights of survival is especially compelling to me.
In 2008, I donated a kidney to teenager Hans San Juan. The transplant was considered a success, and over the next ten years, an abiding friendship was forged. During that decade, Hans grew up, got married, made music, and lived his full, rich life. At the 10-year mark, the kidney failed, and Hans went back on dialysis. As his loved ones began the arduous search for another donor and a second transplant, this suite of poems came into being—a primal scream, a rallying cry. I think people will resonate with this tiny, hangry, jet-fueled memoir in narrative verse because it spins a lyrical suite of survival and the inexplicable lifeforce of the young.
To read more about Angela Carole Brown and her work, visit her website.
The Flapper Press Poetry Café
We welcome submissions from poets for the Flapper Press Poetry Café Poetry Spotlight series. We are always looking for compelling poetry and look forward to publishing and supporting your creative endeavors.
Submissions may also be considered for the Pushcart Prize. Please review our guidelines before submitting. By submitting your work to Flapper Press, you agree to allow us permission to publish. Please note that we receive numerous submissions throughout the year and endeavor to publish as soon as our calendar allows.
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