gasp
I was part of a small group reading last night and I was the first to read. It’s really so informal, and these people at VSC are the best audience — attentive, respectful, warm, open. But of course I was a little bit nervous just because the lights are low, there’s a bright light on me, there’s a speaker, and I have ten minutes — and when I’m a little nervous, my heart beats a little faster and my blood is coursing through my body at a more rapid pace. And I already have that, I already have all this extra blood and my lungs are so compressed.
I sent eight poems to Steve over email and I asked him to pick four — I asked him to just do a cold read and see which ones stuck out to him and I’d read those. But I should have known that he would pick the ones that were the hardest, or the bravest: poems about dogs puking, fears of pregnancy, and strange fur rituals. I was happy to read those, though, because, like in Iron Chef (which we watched once in a hotel room in Seattle), you are rewarded for taking risks.
But I also chose one poem that had the risk of being too difficult to read. In the poem I’m running around the room with string, encircling objects I love, running around some more, encircling some more objects that I love, until the house is a cat’s cradle. But that means that the poem is running, too, and the places to breathe are few. Hm, I should have thought about that a little more. I just envisioned Catherine Zeta-Jones singing at the Oscars 40 weeks pregnant. If she can do it..
The reading was going fine, and then I got to that poem and about halfway through I heard my voice shake and then my throat made this sound that was perhaps a death rattle and I could hear the blood pushing at my eardrums. That’s how much I couldn’t breathe. I took a breath, I kept going on, but then it happened again near the end of the poem, the sound of blood in my eardrums and then I sort of choked on my own lack of oxygen. I had to stop and quickly explain and take a big breath, and then I finished the poem, relieved to be done. I went from totally calm to running a marathon inside the length of one half-page. That’s what it’s like to read in public while a baby’s feet are kicking at your lungs. I’ll have to work on that. But I don’t think I would be kicked off Iron Chef, so I went back to my room and collapsed into my bed in peace.
