"Holes in the shape of stars / punched in gray tin"

What is your body's pathway home?

Nervous system, from Camillo Golgi's Sulla fina anatomia degli organi centrali del sistema nervoso (1885)

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My Mother’s Colander

Dorianne Laux

Holes in the shape of stars
punched in gray tin, dented,
cheap, beaten by each
of her children with a wooden spoon.

Noodle catcher, spaghetti stopper,
pouring cloudy rain into the sink,
swirling counter clockwise
down the drain, starch slime
on the backside, caught
in the piercings.

Scrubbed for sixty years, packed
and unpacked, the baby’s
helmet during the cold war,
a sinking ship in the bathtub,
little boat of holes.

Dirt scooped in with a plastic
shovel, sifted to make cakes
and castles. Wrestled
from each other’s hands,
its tin feet bent and re-bent.

Bowl daylight fell through
onto freckled faces, noon stars
on the pavement, the universe
we circled aiming jagged stones,
rung bells it caught and held.

from Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems by Dorianne Laux. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019)

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Creative Invitation

When you think of the kitchen of the one(s) who raised you, what is the first daily-use object that comes to mind? I remember metal mixing bowls, dented, nesting, given to children to bang on and lick frosting from.

What is the first flavor you feel in your tastebuds? My mouth just began to water with the memory of my mother’s spaghetti coated in melted butter and salt. It’s 3 a.m. here but I just got up and made it, poured the boiling water through a tin colander, added hemp seeds, cayenne pepper, olive oil, dried parsley, garlic powder, and gobbled it up.

I haven’t read the news in weeks because my mother has been recovering from her multiple rib fractures and other injuries, learning how to breathe deeply, walk steadily and carry things again. She is healing, I get to help 24/7 and that’s all that my brain and body have room to hold.

Still, it feels strange to not know about the news, the dismantling of systems and structures that sustain our nation imperfectly. I do trust that I (and you) can cycle out of the choir when we need to. I trust the flaring passions of red-hot resistance, bigger than any fascist poseur. I trust that by breathing into a plastic air resistance instrument for longer each day, my mother can light into Simple Gifts. I trust transformation even (especially) when it takes us into the unknown.

Me: “I’m going to put this lotion on your legs now, so get ready.”
Her: “I never put lotion on my skin. I only use water.”
Me: “I know, that’s why you look like a desert tortoise. You’re in Texas now.”
Her: “Oh.” *experiencing lotion* “That feels good!”
Me: “Doesn’t it?”
Her: “Ah, the desert tortoise. My favorite animal, and so long-lived.”

It’s only been a few hundred years that we’ve had the idea that living things are composed of cells that can talk to each other. These illustrations of the nervous system are some of the very first visuals of the fine branching communication structures inside us. Their scientists/artists—Camille Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal—were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for allowing us to see the invisible tree of connections that pulses with every feeling, memory, thought, movement.

Here’s your creative invitation - draw or write an image of your nervous system at this current moment.

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Illustration from Santiago Ramon y Cajal's Les nouvelles idées sur la structure du système nerveux : chez l'homme et chez les vertébrés, 1894 — Source