Issue 47 Foreword
Suzanne McConnell
Body Politic
We inhabit singular bodies, yet we are communal. It’s no mistake that the term “body politic”—designating the people of a nation or society—incorporates the word “body,” as if collectively one organism. Its medieval Latin form implied the mystical body of the commonwealth. Sociology defines it as society’s practices and policies regulating the human body. For this issue of BLR, we asked for writing addressing the interface of any body politic—societal, ideological, or national—with the personal.
But literature does not lecture. It renders our unique lives, subject to circumstances, and casts them up for us to reflect. In “Departures,” Kristi Ferguson compares the very air of her native Brazil to that of her current American home. In “Rocket Dog” by Lori Huth, an American teenager and her Armenian mother’s cultural tensions are revealed through how, and with what, they nourish their bodies. Alison Luk’s surrealist flash fiction, “Rewilding,” portrays a woman viewing herself as if inhabited by a series of animals.
Bodies have their own wisdom. But can we always trust them? “I wanted to birth you at home, with a crunchy Chicana doula,” Stefani Echevarría-Fenn, the author of “Recompense” declares. Facing the reality of her threatened newborn, she must surrender her “impeccable politics.”
In Lisa Mullenneaux’s poem “Catching Pregnancy,” she looks back on her ninth-grade classmates’ fears of a pregnant student. Through poet Fiona Miller, in “poem from my uterus,” that organ rages: “i’ve kept you arrogant assholes alive / for two million fucking years and what now?”
Men’s bodies have usually been the ones subject to direct warfare and occupational danger. In Vera Kroms’s poem, “Ellis Island, 1951,” she writes “On the island / where we landed, radiation / lit my father up, illuminated / hidden damage.” In Daniel Seifert’s heartbreaking story “Vultur Gryphus,” a seventeen-year-old Bolivian works underground in a silver mine, as his father before him, where exploding silica dust “cripples the lungs.” Paul Howe’s poem “Snow” describes it “falling on the helmets and into the eyes / of soldiers…” momentarily laying “a white sheet over / the disfigured body of this conflict.”
Bodies move. “My mother’s Raleighs were nasty, but as a teenager I snuck two cigarettes from each pack anyway,” Maureen Brady says in “Raleigh Bonuses.” Randy DeVita’s story, “The Window Does Not Open,” concludes with a daring, spontaneous, physical act, cracking wide a figurative window in the protagonist’s life. In Diane Oliver’s posthumously published “The Corner,” she recounts being one of twenty-three Black girls attending the newly integrated University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1962, picketing against segregated businesses on campus.
The body itself is mysterious. In “You Imagine Death,” Justine Payton is “paralyzed by the awareness” that she’d have to navigate a “dark secret alone.” Subsequently actually paralyzed by Guillain-Barré Syndrome, her deliverance begins when she senses an identity apart from her physical being.
What about our collective body politic, then? We are fractious, split. But are we more than that? Our history tells us that we have been there before and something in our essence is bent on surviving.
I am grateful that the writing of my Iowa Workshop classmate, Diane Oliver, is within these pages—testament to one such divisive, violent era. She tragically died two years after writing this essay, but I think she would be gratified to know that their country nominated a Black woman of mixed race as a presidential candidate. Our bodies continue to intersect the world around us, in ways that can be terrifying but occasionally inspiring. May our body politic thrive. May we make peace.