James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poem “Night 4: What They Ask, What I Hear,” appears in the Fall 2020 issue of the Intima.
In 2006, my mother suffered a stroke that left her with severe aphasia, and for the next ten years, as her caretaker, I struggled to make sense of her words. So when I read Jennifer Wolkin’s poem, “Aphasia,” I came to it as someone with first-hand experience. Unfortunately, my mother did not string words together to form such surreal and poetic sentences as the patient in Wolkin’s work. Rather, my mother would swap bad for good, no for yes, and the only whole sentences she formed were strings of curses.
But what struck me when I put “Aphasia” beside my small poem, “Night 4: What They Ask, What I Hear,” was that the engine for my poem was aphasia—obviously, a conscious and controlled aphasia, but an aphasia nonetheless. Part of the joy of writing, I think, how your own creations can come surprise you, how they can be penlights shining on what had been previously been hidden in one’s mind.
Certainly, as I lay in Emory’s ICU those first few days, I grew annoyed with being asked the same questions, to perform the same requests over and over that make up my poem. Just yesterday, though, I read this sentence in The New Yorker: “Ritual, the religious say, expresses spiritual necessity.” At some point, definitely by the time I was drafting the poem, those questions and requests had transubstantiated—they were no longer dumb and irritating, but fundamental and of dire importance. And the call and response they elicited became liturgical, a creed recited, a murmured prayer.
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Terminus, River Styx, Stoneboat, Interim, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, The Cincinnati Review, Vallum, and are forthcoming in the Northern New England Review and others. His chapbook, Visiting Hours, from which this poem is taken, is in search of publisher.
©2020 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine