The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.
September 11: A Transubstantiation
Today I cut myself on a tin can.
I was distracted.
Had this wound been one inch over,
one more deep, I would have lost the ability
to live life with my hands,
to get around by crawling,
claw-like through this life.
It would have left me depending
on my least dominant hand,
writing from the brain less loud.
Instead I am saved by six stitches
and the laughing doctor on-call
who pronounces me lucky,
not to worry, nothing damaged.
Ten days later Suzanne clips
the tied thin shrouded filaments
that keep me from spilling out
and other things from getting in.
I am told this is a good thing
no scar tissue, should heal nicely.
Daily I touch the pink skin and the twelve-holed stigmata.
This new geography changes
minute by minute, separate holes blend together.
From the sky, an airplane view,
it looks like a table set for twelve.
The heads of my apostles
sitting down to supper
watching Jesus transubstantiate before them.
There are certain personal dates in our lives that are unforgettable. Anniversaries, births, deaths, awards, retirement. But there are also historical dates seared into our collective consciousness where each of us recalls where we were and what we were doing on that day. And often they overlap. For me, the roll call of dates goes like this: 1963 (assassination of JFK), 1969 (landing on the moon), 1974 (Nixon resigns) , 1989 (Berlin Wall collapses), 1999 (Columbine shooting), 2001 (9/11 terrorist attacks), and many more.
This poem recounts where I was on September 11. Like so many people, I had been watching the news in between phone calls to loved ones. To distract myself, I decided to clean the house and tossed our household recycling into an outside bin, pushing it down with my hand to make room for more. A few minutes later, I noticed a cut in my palm, cleaned it off, and gauzed it tightly. Quickly, it was drenched. Wrapping my hand in a bloodied towel, I went to a neighbor and in a stupor asked if she thought I should go to the emergency room. She calmly said in her best motherly voice, “maybe that’s a good idea, let me take you.”
What I wouldn’t imagine then is that this date and all it memorializes, would come to signify two other dates way into the future: the death of my cousin John in 2014, and a few hours after his passing, the birth of Theo, my great-nephew.
Dates that seemed to be reserved for one kind of marking morph into something else, more complex.
For me, life is always about holding birth and death in the same palm. I have lived with the scar at the base of my index finger for nearly twenty-three years. And while it has healed, I often find myself rubbing it like some sort of talisman and still look down at it imagining what this poem suggests…that something miraculous might happen.
Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.
She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.
In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.
Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.