Topography of Pain

Topography of Pain

I am built in layers,
outer topography
shaped to a smile.

It isn’t fake—
I’m happy to see you,
happy to shine the spotlight
somewhere else. I rise
like a mountain,
though moments before,
I was low as a trench.

Below the summit, I am still
scoured by rockfall,
carved by floods I didn’t summon.
Who isn’t hollowed
by heartache or loss? 

There’s another layer, though,
below the confines of clay and stone,
an aquifer, pressurized by pain,
clear water that knows 
to find the cracks and
fill the fissures.

I’ve felt its sudden flowing—
a senseless joy that
rushes up,
geyser beneath the
weight of suffering. 

Once, trembling curled in the
coldest loneliness, icesheets for
a marital bed, pain so sharp
I thought it would break me—
I guess it did—faces poured
up through the fissures, 
everyone who loved me was
there in that room. I slept in a
huddle of the warmest limbs. 

Same bed, a few years on,
I begged breath through a
straw blocked on one end,
my chest ached every
attempt to inhale. My body 
wasn’t my body. If I slept, would I
wake again? This time,
strangers reached into the cracks.
I saw them lying in ICUs, 
yellow cabs blaring
from the other side of walls they
might never step beyond. 

I took a breath for them,
willed that thin string of air to
wind its way to the lungs of someone
who needed it more than me. 
Someone always needs it
more than me—this thread
dropped me into the well,
bedrock aquifer, crystal and
calm. I was still
sick, but I wasn’t scared.

I have friends who get upset
when I say it’s okay that I’m sick still.
They don’t want me to bend reality
to a smile; they want reality to bend,
so smiling becomes natural again. 

But what could be more natural
than sipping from the deepest well?
Than looking to joy for a
map through suffering? 
Than looking to suffering
as if it’s connective tissue,
as if cracks and fault lines are just
paths from my heart to yours,

as if isolation
holds its own negation, 
as if smooth places
hide secrets underground,
caverns that defy
boundary lines?

We are never separate,
least of all in our pain. 

When you reach a hand
into the dark, it might be
my breath that
finds your fingers.
When I call into the
void, it might be
your voice
that echoes back. 

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

The Prompt

Since the beginning of May, I’ve been in

Maya C. Popa

’s amazing, MFA-ish community, Conscious Writers Collective. In addition to all sorts of amazing synchronous learning opportunities, this gives me access to Maya’s vault of past courses. A week or so ago I spent a few hours enjoying her course on ‘Writing the Long Poem.’ Prior to this, I had a shorter-is-better bias. Maybe it’s my ADHD brain. Or my mom brain. Or my long Covid brain. But as a reader, I tend to struggle to stay with poems that stretch past a page or two.

Watching Maya’s course helped me to appreciate the way longer poems can allow deeper nuance, hold contradictions, show the passage of time, and invite readers into an unfolding experience, rather than just its ultimate punchline. Above, you have my draft of a long-ish poem. There’s still more work to do, but I enjoyed writing it.

For today’s prompt, I am not telling you to write a long poem (though that could be a possible outcome of this). Instead, I want to invite you to try a variation on the process that I used to arrive at this poem. Grab a piece of paper and a pen (or sit down at your computer), set a timer for ten minutes, and free write whatever comes into your mind. Drop your filter. You can throw this document away when you’re done if you’d like. Just write. It will probably come out as prose. Don’t polish it, don’t fret over it, just let it pour out, even if the end result is something like “Oh my gosh this is so stupid, I hate free writing, nothing of value is going to come up, I used to like Lisa, but now I’m just so over her and her dumb prompts.”

If inspiration does strike before the timer dings, and a poem starts bubbling to the surface, of course you can roll with that, and switch from free writing into following the thread of that inspiration. Otherwise, when the buzzer goes off, take a breath or two, and look back over what you’ve written. Are there themes that emerge? Word pairings that grab you? Metaphors that want to be developed? Find your own prompt—whatever pulls you—from within what you’ve written. Then, long, short, or in-between, write your poem from there!

I look forward to reading your poems, friends. I hope the plunge into your stream of consciousness is refreshing, fruitful, surprising, or interesting!