Ekstasis
BY JENNY MOLBERG
My therapist asks me first if I’ve ever self-harmed. Here is what I’m looping on. Here is my containment box. Here is where bilateral movement can be a kind of aesthetic practice for survival.
I’m wearing the perfume called Elegy.
When I think about the Hall of Dead People I look under my feet. How beautiful and mossy they smell.
Dissociation is a good tool. Taking off the self feels as sexy as a clean bathroom. In the neutral room all the tethers fall away. Healing is not linear so it swirls at the drain.
Every line knows. The frown like a wound, like the generosity in saying a person did the best they could. The old clock ringing in the library.
I fell in love with the artist playing the piano. I fell in love with the way their pajama pants made a blanket for the black bench and the way I became stupid around them, envying their cigarettes.
The language of translation is spiritual. There are things we are holding in the dark night of language. Welcome to the throat church. Welcome to the night church of my throat.
The Craft is wingspan: a reach into an unarmed trauma of childhood. The Craft is Mother.
Joan Mitchell’s mother was a poet. Elaine de Kooning’s mother was neglectful. Catholic, a sorceress. Helen Frankenthaler described her mother as Valkyrien. She was like her father, like me. Often when I’m at my angriest, she said, I’m at my funniest.
My husband says, You can actually die if you color yourself entirely in Sharpie. I think this statement shows how choosing him was choosing myself, in all the best ways.
I am a 21st century Lake Poet. I walk straight into the water to flood out the intrusive thoughts.
Elaine de Kooning’s Veronica implies a man, the matador, the picadores like musical instruments, his suit of light, the gold underside of the cloak. I hate this. I hate even thinking about a man in a cape.
The Craft takes the side of the bull. She removed the murderous man. She glorified the bull. My grandmother gave me two sketches for this painting, which hung over my sofa until my abuser took me to court, and I had to sell them to pay for the lawyer.
The time has come for all men to refuse to be killed, Elaine de Kooning wrote in her scrapbook about Caryl Chessman, the serial rapist. I myself have a very special loathing for the rapist and apparently Chessman was guilty of this crime.
How are we going to get rid of murder, she wrote, when governments condone it?
My ending is despair, she wrote, when Chessman was murdered by the government.
In my marriage my biggest worry is that if I behave like a married person then the love will just become cardboard, and then wet cardboard, and then pulp, and then there’s nothing left to write on.
The female nude was forbidden in almost all public art schools as late as 1850 and after.
My earliest form of protest was called tomboy.
I wrote a poem after I was sexually assaulted and brought it to workshop. My professor said that the experience of disembodiment would be more believable if the speaker were a man.
André Malraux said, the fascination of the forbidden is the requisite of the erotic.
In a 1965 ArtForum interview that I find very hot, Helen Frankenthaler said, There are colors and the question is what they are doing with themselves and with each other. Sentiment and nuance are being squeezed out.
The one teacher I admire says that nuance is a form of resistance.
This is what you’ve always been made to feel, my artist friend says, that you’re too loud and too much and you should shut the fuck up.
I fake my own death in the virtual realm. It’s an ecstasy. I vanish the reservoir of other people, all with their agendas for me.
My therapist says my focus stays locked on the damage when it should be focused on recovery.
In a Classical body, Aphrodite gestures to her sex organs. In Christian culture, we gesture towards shame, body dysmorphia, a preoccupation with whiteness. Replicas of Aphrodite everywhere. Not hot.
My classical body has been scalpeled three times. Pieces of my meniscus, breasts, and spine in trash cans marked Medical Waste!
How little we knew Sappho! My friend says. Maybe she had a healthy way of expressing primal anger!
One of Bill de Kooning’s women is covered in what looks like bullet holes. Elaine clarified: they were very chic rubies that would be applied to the skin. Bill had seen them in an issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
Like Elaine de Kooning, I used to laugh when someone tried to hit me. We are happy, we are. What we don’t have, what we are looking for, is peace.
Jenny Molberg is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Molberg is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.
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