​After Remedios Varo [Rheumatic Pain, 1948], by Ann E. Michael

Rheumatic Pain, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1948

​After Remedios Varo [Rheumatic Pain, 1948]
 
They wrap me in the pained body of linen strips 
striping flesh compressed and pressured sealing 
what’s physical from view so that none can see 
agonies as my face portrays them, refuse to admit
the failure of their purported cures and pin me 
with excuses pressed into my Self: she suffers from 
ego neurasthenia hypo-gyno-other-chondrias 
female problems meno-glosses a glossary of terms 
that imply head has no truck with the body, with its 
boundaries, bounties, bowels. Red means swelling, 
signifies pain—say to my beloved untether me
I prefer undoing to unknowing, to the forces that tell me
“press on” toward an unwelcoming citadel that never 
has been my goal. There’s no remedy from men 
in medical smocks who’d swaddle me in certainty 
or terminology. Unpin me from these message boards. 
Let me float in my own corpus lightly above a world 
of hurt. I’ve earned my right to cry Let go.
 
Ann E. Michael

Ann E. Michael's latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Retired from academia, she keeps busy as a hospice volunteer, gardener, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at http://www.annemichael.blog