Nonfiction by Meg LeDuc
THE TESTAMENT OF MY BODY
Chapter 1
I’m reading Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, on this October morning.
2 Julian writes, “Whenever a human mother nurtures her child with all that is beautiful and good, it is God-the-Mother who is acting through her.”
3 The mist swirls in the darkness outside, lying heavy to the north, fecund on the fields,
4 Where huddled houses give way to cows, calves clasped to brown-velvet flanks.
5 Darkness hungers to hold. Yet the light begins to burn away the dark,
6 Day rolls and savors the night, taking it upon its tongue,
7 The way, this past Sunday, I took my husband’s cock between my lips, tongued and savored,
8 A moment which was Song of Songs in its sweetness: “Let him kiss me with the kisses
of his mouth—For your love is better than wine,”
9 When he entered me, I asked myself if I would swell “with child,” as the ancient words go—
10 Like Julian did, too.
Chapter 2
We cannot write the name of God.
2 But there is coming a queen who will write it. She will be the bride, the mother of his children.
3 From the cave of time, she will rise, her pinnacles pelicans, her loins oysters, her cunt like a dove.
4 She will sail the stormy forests.
5 She will shelter me in the beating heart of birds,
6 And I will swell with seed.
6 So let the burrow of the snake rise with torrents. Let the hills teeth themselves with sheep—
7 For my God is holy.
Chapter 3
Trying to calm myself, I sink into the bath in the home I share with my husband Tim. Water engulfs my thighs, the news blaring from the living room.
2 TV usually soothes my brain, white noise a soporific, like the Klonapin with which I dose myself.
3 “…his parents are being charged in the premeditated attack.”
4 What kind of pink violence is it we birth?
5 I once overdosed on Benadryl and alcohol in the back of my car. Hours after downing hundreds of minute pink pills chased by Bud Lite, I woke with cotton-candy vomit tangling my hair.
6 I have to move the car. People will be looking for me.
7 I dragged myself out and slid behind the wheel. I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.
8 And then, a blank.
9 The next thing I remember: my hands on the steering wheel, maneuvering the car down a freeway on-ramp.
10 Then, blackness.
11 Now, the waters of the bath slowly return me to my body.
12 I know why anxiety overtakes me on the road—and I know why anxiety overtakes me now, too.
15 Yesterday, I got my IUD removed.
16 I fear becoming suicidal with postpartum depression or psychotic, a psychosis from which I might never escape.
17 I pray to be a good mother, and I write towards forgiveness.
18 I mark myself again and again, just as I wrote into my own flesh, cutting with a razor.
19 This violence is ordinary, mundane, like a boy hurting a girl, 20 Like a girl hurting herself.
21 How can we ever let go of the blade?
Chapter 4
In the Berean Standard Bible, the translation of Isaiah 58:1 reads, “Cry aloud, do not hold back! Raise your voice like a ram’s horn. Declare to My people their transgression and to the house of Jacob their sins.”
2 What are my sins? Are they like a ram’s horn sounded upon the mountains?
3 Do my sins make the mountains fall, the crops wither, the seas dry up, so the Leviathan gasps upon the sand?
4 Because I am sinful, I pass in front of the LORD, burning with a fire that does not consume.
5 When I began to descend into sorrow, as a teenage girl, slicing my arms, punching my thighs, God hunted me down where I huddled, unprotected by the hollow of the hills.
6 The girl sings to God-the-Monster but her bones will be picked clean by him, in that day she shall not escape,
7 And the mountains shall bloom above the cave, so my LORD says to me,
8 “Go down to the dark, and sit there for all time, until the ram’s trumpet sounds a message upon the hills declaring,
9 You shall name your daughter ‘Gabriella,’
10 Because she will call you out of your sin, out of the punishment I have stored up for you.
11 Only your husband will impregnate you.
12 For your faithfulness I will forgive you 16 And declare that you shall suffer no more.”
Chapter 5
The scholar who annotated my version of Julian’s Revelations argues the saint had no less than three children.
2 He surmises that she was born a member of the gentry, Lady Julian Erpingham.
3 After her first husband died, she married Sir John Philip of Dennington, bearing three children: Rose, William, and John II.
4 Despite these bodily bonds,
5 Julian became an “anchorite,” cloistering herself in the grand tradition of men and women of God, and the record of Lady Julian Erpingham abruptly ends, as if she had died.
6 In her visions, Julian recounts taking a “little thing” into her hand, a little thing “the size of a hazelnut,” asking, “What can this be?”
7 “And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is.”
8 I answer, “The seed swelling within—life itself.”
9 Now, in this night giving way to day, I sit enthroned on Julian’s hazelnut
10 And wonder if it can carry me into the future.
11 Maybe I dance a jig upon it, curtseying to my partner, Christ adorned with thorns,
12 And we dance upon the hazelnut until it cracks, and we topple into each other’s arms—
13 Laughing the laughter of the free.
Chapter 6
My college boyfriend Adam once held me stiflingly close and asked, “Can I call your pussy a cunt in bed?”
2 I didn’t know what to say, only felt his arms tightening around me, and nodded, wordless.
3 I didn’t know I could say no.
4 As the months of dating passed, I knelt among withered roots along the banks of the Huron River, up to my ankles in muck and marsh marigold, wading out amidst the condoms, phallic puffs packed with slag, floating unused on the water, because Adam always told me he could “pull out.”
5 Even I wasn’t that stupid.
6 Campus Medical Services made obtaining birth control easy, but I remained on my parents’ health insurance and didn’t know how to access it without my deeply religious mother finding out.
7 I dreaded beholding a dead baby.
8 I fantasized about giving myself a closed head injury if I became pregnant, perhaps jumping from the top of a parking garage but somehow surviving, so a baby could grow grow grow inside me while I lingered, comatose, something akin to a virgin birth, I a Madonna.
Chapter 7
“Hear from the Book of your God,” says the LORD. “Sing, O barren one, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife…”
2 I reply, “O, my heart, break forth like the blossom, like the bee singing to the blossom. Break forth with hymns, hosannas, and then pray like your cunt is adorned with apples: ‘Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth, peace, peace, and more peace.’”
3 For my cunt song in that day will be anemones a-hum with honey, driven hair, driving, driving me.
4 The children of the barren one will rule the ground. Her children will shape the dust, so it will sing nonces to our God,
5 As if nuns and monks kiss through the night, and nuns give birth in surprise at sunrise.
6 The red light will light within nuns like the blood of the islands, their wombs brimming with gulls, with sandpipers, with pelicans. “The pelicans will come from the north and alight on the beaches of salt,” promises the LORD.
7 Nothing will be lost.
8 For the pelican will rush down the storm, down the barren, not-barren islands, as I sail upon its wings.
9 On the wing of the bird, I will be safe.
Chapter 8
Julian’s cell would have been approximately nine and a half feet by eleven and a half feet, the walls made of flint.
2 The flinty faithfulness of God is yet soft as the rushes that probably covered the cell’s floor, strewn with herbs to keep the fleas away.
3 The anchorite’s cell would likely have had three windows, including a “squint,” opening upon the church through which she could see the altar,
4 And a window to the public way, covered with a curtain cut with a cross, which the saint never pulled aside,
5 So she never saw the faces of those who spoke to her.
6 From this holy loneliness, I ask, what did Julian’s being birth?
7 With what did she swell in solitude—except God? So, she became mother-of-all, Mary.
8 God lit Mary’s womb, impregnating her, so Joseph considered putting her away
9 Until the revelation of the messenger spoke to the immortal ages
10 With a promise for all kind, and the ram on the hills leapt for joy
11 And the lamb gamboled,
12 And God promised, “Whatever you birth will bless.”
Chapter 9
The LORD will turn from his wrath because I declare Jehovah is One yet Three, and He says, “Come, let us create them in our own image, man and woman, we will create them.
2 Woman will be made in our image; we will make her face the face of the deep,
3 And her breasts will be pearls, her womb a treasure chest filled with oysters. The tent of the sea shall enlarge, the sea itself shall lengthen its cords, waves give way to waves, islands to peninsulas, archipelagos to continents. The continents will erupt in hosannas,” says the LORD.
4 Nothing will be lost when nuns give birth at dawn to the children of the holy men, the prophets of Britania, of Sepharad and Hoddu, the prophets who sing songs of dew over breakfasts of bacon.
5 For the profane becomes the holy in this terrorist lust of morning.
6 The desire of dawn touches everything it finds, bringing all that is out of the burrow where the snake sleeps away the snow.
Chapter 10
Tim and I attend a potluck after church. In the basement: crock pots of beans and pulled pork, homemade lemon bars. Small children, without using their hands, attempt to eat donuts hanging from strings.
2 I watch the blush faces, hot with effort, tiny tongues pink like petals straining for cinnamon.
3 I realize I’m staring—with my own hunger.
4 Later at home, Tim lies in bed, having taken off his good clothes.
5 I circle the bed, my desire for him red as a tulip.
6 I slide in beside him and press my lips against his mouth.
5 He kisses back, his tongue finding mine. His hand slips to my breasts.
7 But he stops and says, “We aren’t shooting blanks anymore.”
8 “It’s more that I had a shield. Like I was wearing a helmet. Or a wetsuit.” We laugh.
9 I lean over my husband, stroking his face, his brows, and ask the question I’ve been wanting to ask.
10 “Tim, if we have a baby with a serious disability, will we keep the pregnancy?”
11 My husband gazes into my eyes. “Do you mean a non-life-threatening problem?”
12 “Yes, like Down Syndrome or cerebral palsy.”
13 “I think we would.”
14 “It would be the right thing to do.”
13 I seek his mouth again. But in this moment, I wonder, Will I grieve?
14 I have no answer—
15 And offer the apple of my mouth.
Chapter 11
Everything is wild and mysterious as an archangel. Nothing holy here, yet there are holes in me, so my cunt weeps.
2 Jesus wept.
3 Things are riven to the core, an atom splitting, God and Jesus, the Father and the Spirit.
4 A cloud hovers over the face of the deep, pneuma, spirit, breath.
5 Is this the ghost with whom I must walk?
6 There is no answer to the breathing birth of babies born with holes in their hearts, except this— “Jesus wept.”
7 There is no answer but to say, “Listen, my child.”
8 To say, “Because I love you like I love the apricot and aromatic cane, I will make the star ardent and sleek in your skin.
9 For whom do I not call, whom do I not seek? Who is not found?”
10 I will have one husband—you, O my God.
11 Nevertheless, I am the grass.
Chapter 12
It’s my fortieth birthday.
2 I run under trees flaming with the stored sun of summer, wicked to the edge,
3 Down Bethune, I take a left on Mendota Avenue and pass New Mt. Vernon Missionary Baptist, legs shaky from lack of exercise, muscles suddenly put to the test.
4 My body is powerful.
5 My lungs burn.
6 Like the leaves, I, too, am wick lit, my feet pound the pavement, a prayer. Breath rises in me, tested.
7 My mother once told me, “I might lose my baby in pursuit of a baby.”
9 I stoop to pick up a nut from below my sneaker, roll it between thumb and forefinger, and think of Julian.
10 I know the littlest thing, which is all that is, holds me even now.
Meg LeDuc is a writer and copywriter based in the Detroit area. She earned a BA in English from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essays have appeared in Atticus Review, Brevity, Cleaver Magazine, and Mount Hope Magazine, and essays are forthcoming from Majuscule Magazine and The Progressive. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of three Hopwood Awards, she received a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Participant Scholarship in Nonfiction. For more: www.megleduc.com
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