Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: In her poem “Magnets” Laurie Clements Lambeth grapples with a reality familiar to people in extended quarantine: brain fog, a sensation she describes as “dulled, not knowing what was flesh or air or where—;” This line, like so many others in this poem, stops midthought, forcing the reader to enact the experience that the poem describes. To read this poem is to stop and start, to recognize that this particular kind of confusion is “difficult to love, not quite // friendly.” Like Lambeth, I wish I could “reverse / polarities” on what feels like the brain’s betrayal. Yet, like the magnet that doesn’t lose its charge, the body simply is. It exists sometimes in a clear state, and sometimes in a foggy one, leaving us with no choice but to love this not-quite-friendly confusion, whether we want to or not.
To hear Laurie read the poem, click below:
Magnets
I asked you if magnets ever lose their charge,
remembering the U-shaped ones I threw out
in childhood when their red ends weakened.
A silly question. My silly memory, fooling me
again. No, that doesn’t happen was the answer
or something like that. You said — maybe, and — ( — — )
after I told how time folded wrong in my head, sudden
lapse, and I was beyond late, baffled by time’s pitch
and spring: a new dropped connection in the wires.
Then the limbs and brain encased in fog all day,
dulled, not knowing what was flesh or air or where—;
Confusion is difficult to love, not quite
friendly. If some small charge might return, reverse
polarities (if that is the right term)—
Laurie Clements Lambeth is the author of the National Poetry Series selection Veil and Burn (University of Illinois Press, 2008). Recent poems have appeared in Ecotone, Poetry, Zocalo Public Square, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently working on her second collection and a memoir, she teaches medical humanities at the University of Houston.
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