Joshua Cohen - Witz

It’s here that she births herself. Insideout.

It’s all in the hips, their bones softened in her own churning water, a heavy flow like the chugging of laundry, the colors, the whites and the deathblacks, a night. A give in the womb. Her lips open, her legs come through, but the inside of legs, their insides, ligaments to tendons sucked up then out feetfirst, coming through bound in veins…then, her thighs follow, their fat greases them through, here the bulge of her waist, there the lower half consuming the upper, the teethmarks of her panty’s band, their elasticized chatter; she leans up against the warmth of the washingmachine, which is on, the sounds of which, its regular rumblings turned shudders, are louder than hers, conceal, consume, the shakes of the floor, flakes of basement’s ceiling, plaster-skin peeled and the heat: Sabbath upon Shabbos of this has accustomed her to the quiet required; still, her bottom lips tend to bleed. Her breasts come through before her arms, the underneaths of inverted nipples, their reversed areolæ like drinkcoasters on cedarwood, wet, how she’d always have to remind, Wanda, too, don’t put a glass on the wood — then the arms, their fingers to elbows to shoulders, and at the last moment of hold, the last stain upon time, she throws the rag she’s been holding to her mouth to the mouth of the thrashing machine (later, to that of the dryer nextdoor); she opens the lid, the cycle stopped, closes the lid to begin the rumble again, and the heat. Her limbs aren’t broken, they’re too weak to break — complaining, overcooked — gone is the fatty droop, their deflationary birthdayballooning…and the batwings, too, the darkening cystics of their wens: first the fingers of her servinghand, her slicinghand, her fork and her spoon hand and that, too, of the knife to carve in the kitchen not to cut with at table, these without nails, stripped of their prints; and then, her elbows push through, are pushed knocked like her knees are into shoulders, her head nods through insensate, serously, viscous strandings from scalp, placental skull, the sac of her mouth a bubble to dirtily burst with a thermometer’s pin, a dimpling thimble, get a lick of soap, wash it all out…hair down the sleeve of her throat. The inside of her face is amniobathed, bared gel the quivering skin of the eyes, her nostrils denuded, flaringly roused by a smell like the scorch of detergent, a quick bleaching, a twitch of a moustache her lightened lashes and brows…her lips lick themselves as if she’s eaten herself, not quite, more like she’s gotten only a taste, a free sampling, and wants more, needs it: she holds naked fingers to her lips insideout, gazes beyond her blind to the crack of light coming in from the door’s draft, where it should be, should’ve been.

The Table

And then the table — you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?

Our sages tell us thusly: that she sat on the earth, as if in mourning already…as one authority holds: mourning herself, her kinder, the world.

And that then a root grew up inside her, filling her up.

Others say the following: a root hung from the lips of His mother, those lips some say — how it hung like a tongue, prideful, waggingly wild. As it itched, she scratched, the mouth of those lips, and at her womb, too, full of dirt. Mud, which was the dirt wet from her, which fell from there according to some, here where she walked wherever it fell, and that she followed this dirt feeling dirty, as still others interpret — as if hope upon hopes the trail would lead to somebody else, would track yet another, a fellow mother to dirt…to mud, to filth, though she seemed if she ever existed to be always behind her. As she swept herself, she followed herself forever, swept up after herself and before herself, too, a monstrous mopping, as she circled (and circled) the barren of garden, swept herself with a broom bound of thistles, a mop, while others say thorns, then scrubbed at herself with the sea, the scrub of a bush — most say it burned.

All agree — she was not yet His mother; as per tradition, not anyone’s yet but her own.

It all began with an itching: when she awoke in the mornings flat out on the earth she had scratchmarks, manicuredeep, on her thighs, then around the low of her stomach, that she’d scratch at these itches, then how she’d feel suddenly huge, and ashamed, and then vomit, which made her feel better, a little, vomiting dew the texture of morning, that she’d then in embarrassment — though no one else was around — wander away from her mess, further always to the root of her home.

And that the root then grew up to a trunk, that the root then grew out to other roots, too…the roots hung there in the air, the air was rootrent — that she walked around the undergrown garden, which was too sparse with growth too small to hide the huge of her nakedness now, and with a tree sticking out of her, treeing up…its trunk protruding unwieldy, must be careful, she’d fall.

That she’d stroke the trunk through the night, a new limb.

How its slow branching made her bleed, O the cut of its bark.

She was impure and had to immerse herself, she had to submerge herself and her tree in the ocean, to water it, then, to scrub from it its bark dead like a skin — to shed, it’s said, the snake of her limb.

There was a hollow inside, and how despite that she’d complain of an emptiness…the form of its hurt, and not hurt itself. Hard to explain. How she couldn’t stand, and so she’d lie down in the grass; she couldn’t bend, couldn’t lean, only lie. That was difficult, too. When wet, the trunk would swell inside her, and so she’d throwup into a basin, now a river to island her garden — or, how she’d vomit into the sky according to some, vomiting the sky itself others hold, constellations of mouthstuff, acidic stars.

One night, she was flung high up to the air toward the sky, as the tree grew to height, took root deep in the earth down below her up high, cubits above in the treetop, atop sore and there swayed by the wind.

How do I get myself into these things?

And how out?

She found herself talking to the tree, her voice was the wind.

And then she slept, head on moss.

And then woke.

She stood emptied out on the sturdiest of her limbs that she’d slept on, atop the tree she’d just birthed, and gazing out over the lie of the land.

And its beasts.

There was a husband in the distance, too, years ahead, decades and menses — in his hands, he appeared to hold loaves.

This tree is our house — it’s more hers.

Of the tree grown down from within her with her on top of the tree grown down and then out of her up.

One morning, she began her descent: plucking the stem from her navel, from the highest of her tree’s branches the umbilicus bud, the soft, downy, prettypink petiole blooming in white, pricked and ripped — then slinking her shimmying way, down past boughs wet with her, in a pomaceous tumble soon splitting her legs and, trunkhugging, the tightening hug of such thighs…until she touched ground, a firm footing, arrived. An apple as if a breast of hers or another belly went loose with the rock and the shake — gravity fell is how, and the fruit hit her on the head, then hit the ground and rolled over the horizon, the sun. She gave a yell, he heard her yell, then turned his head to her and realized by this risen sun how late in the distance he was — that he had to arrive, must…he’ll be late soon enough.

Her tree grew down ever further, then, how it drunk down even lower to stay: it branched into the earth, roots to vein the beneath, seeking a wet other than hers, its very source that had seeded — down into the sidewalks, the breakyourback cracks, down into the asphalt, the now landscaped lawn of the garden.