Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: When families disagree about politics, the experience can often be a physical one: tightened jaws, tense stomach muscles, stiff back. Heather Lanier’s poem looks at such disagreements through the lens of the body as well, but the body in a surgical theater, being cut into. The content of the political debates isn’t important in such a context, she shows us, while also challenging us to see the connections between the family and the body politic. Far from eliding or suppressing the notion of conflict, this poem argues that, paradoxically, ruptures can actually bring things (and people) together.
To hear Heather read her poem, click below:
My Family and I Disagree about Politics
We will always get naked for the surgeons.
Our bodies will be laid before them, dense as sandbags.
They will operate no matter whom we named our leader.
They will remove gangrenous bits, slice out polyps, cut us to heal.
Fathers will not even think to ask that they excise our next rally cry.
Mothers will not inquire if our opinions can be scooped out too.
Our beloveds will bite nails as they wait, fall in love with our physicians,
however briefly. The stitches always disintegrate.
Skin finds itself again, like a split sea, although sometimes it takes staples.
Sometimes you have to puncture the body to hold it together.
Heather Lanier is the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks as well as the memoir Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin, 2020), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared most recently in The Atlantic, The Sun, and Longreads. You can find her on Instagram @heatherklanier and at heatherlanierwriter.com.
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