This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Talk Smack to a Hurricane by Lynne Jensen Lampe (IceFloe Press 2022).
Fingered
I write poems with hands like hers. Rounded fingertips
smudge the page with mental health & mental illness,
blister as power dictates the same old social contract
between doctor & patient—love me, revere me,
obey me—I’ll say you’re healthy. In 1883
the State Insane Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana, swallowed
Emma Carraby, 58. Recorded diagnosis: noisy & trouble-
some. Viola Wade, 36. Deceptive in her affections. Comfort
Kemp, 27. Homicidal mania due to giving birth. Renamed
East Louisiana State Hospital, the asylum admitted
Louise, 34, my mother, already tethered in 1968
to the DSM via the fraying rope of schizophrenia & manic-
depression. Bipolar disorder with psychotic features
due to giving birth. Being pregnant changed her brain
chemistry, she said. I heard you
caused my crazy. Never get pregnant.
But maybe she was telling me every woman changes
after making a child, & she was willing to risk being someone
new, again. She’d already worn skins named daughter,
writer, smoker. Grad student, traveler. Wife. Mother
un-Mothering when another family adopted her first child.
Patient. & now mother, again. Juggernaut of emotions
& hormones splatter small rooms of the heart chemical red,
track years in sulfur & saffron, kitten heels & paper slippers.
Palmistry considers conic fingers a sign of creativity,
intuition. Psychiatry considers womanhood a disease.
Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Lips Poetry Journal, Stone Circle Review, Rise Up Review, THRUSH, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO, where she’s a core member of Dame Good Writers.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
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