Punctum

Sometimes pain hits and I think
soon I’ll arise and go back
to those dark rows of pine 
between the old house and its street. 

That little depleted wood
with its road-bank of starveling brambles.

What was I like as a child?

My mother says easy, my father says “I don’t know.”
My mother says, on your tenth birthday
I remember you climbed a tree
to escape your own party. 

Bark under palm-callous.
Sap lurking in every inch. 

I was fast, and rude.
Another -- girl -- followed me up
got a twig in her eye.

Vast blood smothered it.

Everything obvious needed words then. And long after.

Prompt: What scenes from your own life might be simultaneously banal and uncanny? What were some of your routines, your unarticulated habits, as a young person? Did they involve moving through particular spaces? Making particular arrangements of items that were important to you? Repeating or writing certain words? What’s the unmapped habitual territory of where you began to become a person you recognize – most of the time – today?

Write down something you used to do all the time when you were younger but haven’t done or thought about for years now. Be very detailed. You could even write it down as a “how-to” list for someone seeking to recreate this remembered set of actions. Once you have the ritual or habit written out, consider: where does it resemble a myth, a fairytale, a ghost-story?

Rewrite your ritual, your habit, and add vocabulary from the weird, the magical, even the apocalyptic. Play with scale. Maybe the objects and events you remember can be represented as much bigger or much smaller now? Maybe they’re ready to burst into cool flame. Maybe some of them have developed voices.

Don’t however allow your recovered scene to be pulled fully into a specific genre of non-realistic storytelling. Use the first-draft written version of your own habit/ritual to draw those genres toward you — toward what you did and who you were becoming.

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Their poetry chapbooks, And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death, and Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.