Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Suffering Is Not Special

(for/after James Baldwin)

“It is perfectly possible—indeed, it is far from uncommon—to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sown together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again?”

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

***

Sundays are for putting on the animal skins and sewing them up then doing a small something personal—eating, reading, texting—while wearing them.

Mondays are for being tired. Twelve hours feels like a full week. And then not talking. Eating something from a box or bag. Then sleeping.

Tuesdays are for getting to therapy. Doing something hard—or many things—and then talking. Just getting there can be enough.

Wednesdays are for… I can’t remember Wednesdays right now. A Wednesday happens right as rain in a cloud of itself that I can’t see inside of from here but I know I’ve been there a great many times.

Thursdays are for white knuckling. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. Do the job that’s in front of you. In this it isn’t that different from the other days but it is more so until…

Fridays are for noticing that seams have popped and frayed and slipped. The animal skin—second skin—has a few gaping holes and has caught on a few joints. It’s not looking or feeling so good. But I can take some breaths and readjust and resew the gaps. I can cut and sew patches from the basket of animal skin scraps in the laundry room. Then Fridays are for surviving. Making it through as the animal skulks about in the corner of my eye all day long—hunting me all day long. And I realize it’s always there and has always been there. It is my familiar companion and antagonist.

And Saturdays are for taking off the skins and for screaming and for wanting to walk a mile into the ocean to drown crying a river into the cistern and showering in the tears and drinking in the tears from the faucet and washing the dishes in the sink with the tears and for putting the tears into a bowl by the back stairs for my doppelganger to lap—to give me a respite—if it will. If it will.

***

April 14, Ruination Day

James Cook is a teacher and writer. He has published poems and essays in Polis, No Infinite, SpoKe, Jacket 2, Let the Bucket Down, and elsewhere. He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx