As a writer, to give life to a story, I reach for my pen and notebook, craft words into images, lines, sentences. I find it inspiring to explore how other artists use their preferred media to tell stories.
In my poem “Young Woman Listens to Cyndi Lauper During Dialysis” (Spring 2021 Intima), I open a window into an experience of eating disorder. Our relationship with our body evolves as we grow up and grow old, and often also at a much smaller time scale. Seeing the beauty in our body each day, each moment, is fundamental for our wellbeing. Eating disorders throw that relationship in disarray with destructive consequences for our physical and emotional health.
In contrast, two artists in the Fall 2018 Intima show us how our body can be seen as a garden of elegant shapes and rich colors.
Looking at Kristen Kelly’s painting Floral Anatomy (above), our eyes cross a barely perceptible boundary running along the middle of the canvas, and move back and forth from female pelvic organs to a bouquet of flowers in bloom. After the initial surprise at the composition of anatomy and garden, the image made me think about the loss of sense of beauty that occurs in eating disorders: the self-image shatters like a glass hit by a stone.
In Ephemeral Garden by Lindsey Francis, we contemplate a 3D female torso on which anatomical elements, lush red poppies and a butterfly are layered to create the place of the title. This artwork also breaks the boundary between inside and outside establishing the body as present in both dimensions.
(c) Ephemeral Garden by Lindsey Francis. Fall2018 Intima
My poem’s narrator is trapped into a reasoning that treats her body as an adversary to tame. She takes refuge in music and while she wishes to be the girl of the song, to be walking into the light, she is dragged back into the shadow of the room where she is undergoing dialysis. She does not see her body as a garden. The body must be tamed to an idea that does not reflect the blooming, the nurturing, the richness. The journey to healing is personal, goes through reconciliation: we see blood as sap, breathing as a butterfly, and our body blooms. Then we are able to walk in the sun.
Simona Carini writes nonfiction and poetry and has been published in various print and online venues. Born in Perugia, Italy, a graduate of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan, Italy) and of Mills College (Oakland, CA), Carini lives in Northern California with her husband and works as a data scientist at an academic research institution. For more of her work go to simonacarini.com. Her poem “Young Woman Listens to Cyndi Lauper During Dialysis” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.