From “The Uncured World”

I decide to name my body. Jane. Jean. Janet. I’ve never liked names that begin with that uncertain sound, wobbling between consonant options like a bowling pin on the fritz. But I need to embrace a thing I have never cared for. As a kid I loved the game of telephone, one mishearing after another, the transformation, the delight at the end when the secret of the final whisperer was unveiled. Incense, insect, instant. Drench, trench, wrenched. Language, languish, anguish. We played at the margins of the senses, pretended loss where there was none, made the privilege of hearing into a game. One erasure, another erasure. Janet—unfixed, unmoored, unwell—time to mobilize.

Copyright © 2024 by Elisabeth Frost. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 28, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem is from a series of prose poems called ‘The Uncured World.’ Following major surgery to remove a tumor in my spine, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, I began to chart my changing relationship to my body. Adjusting to living with chronic pain, and reflecting on the ableism that underwrote societal responses to the pandemic, I have thought hard about the problems of seeking definitive cures and about the challenges of accepting bodily adaptations in my life. I am indebted to disability activism and disability arts practices, which teach me how best to inhabit an all too often uncomfortable world.”
—Elisabeth Frost