My Skin is Inscribed with Stories
How have words written you? — June’s Prose Poem Prompt
In the word was the beginning. Before — only a darkness we don’t remember. Is the opposite of darkness a story?
- dingue / tongue / lingualis / lingua / language
Every word is a story — if you listen closely —I hear them travel the tongues of history. Hear them cross deserts and mountains, exchanged between tribes, with corn or furs — but an accidental barter. Hear them evolve, adapting — vowels like nomadic travellers, bedding down for a season in one word, fording a river to reside in another. Picking up new meanings, like the mud encrusting the feet of their consonants, as they wander. Leaving traces behind in villages and towns — the contagion of connotations, denotations, associations — spreading from mouth to mouth, like plague.
I imagine them, boarding boats as stowaways in sailor’s mouths, migrating across seas to foreign ports. Sloshing from one glass to another in midnight tavern-tales, amongst the mingle of seafaring strangers.
Where a clue was a centuries-old ball of yarn— unravelled through time, follow it into the present — to where it’s a possible answer to a mystery — like language’s unpredictable unfoldings and evolvings. Its mercuric illogical logic.
The tracts of language — laid out, like palimpsests across time — scored with older echoes of iconography, etched whispers like clues, like tracks in the forests of humanity’s memory— even as new tales are told.
Every word is a story.
2. logos / philology / etymology / logophile / logophilia
Within every word is a world — my brain breaks them apart — dissects them for their etymology — like linguistic biology — with my slicing scalpel of curiosity. Vivisecting prefix from suffix — separating Latin from Greek — Sanskrit from Phoenician — scraping samples for their DNA — following the helix-unravelling —
Like Ariadne’s thread, down through time’s linguistic labyrinth — to their first archaic utterance, when coiled in the entrails of every word was a visceral cry for survival. Confronting those mythical Minotaurs, charging at my throat — not with fury, but the power of meaning. Place the old words on my tongue, mold my mouth to the memories of my ancestors — or of peoples never known. Feel their hungers and desires curling my lip, catching at my uvula — determination to leave a narrative of themselves behind.
Within every word is a world.
3. historia / estorie / history /story
The skin of me is inscribed with stories — I am a palimpsest, marked with multiple texts. By candlelight or sunlight, different stories are illuminated— I’m versed in the art of revealing while concealing. Rewritten, revised and reimagined — even the experts argue over my origin story — my scripto inferior — now the hardest to discern.
Lay me atop a lightbox — pinpoint the places where two texts intersect, making new meanings. Interpret the absences — where I’ve scrubbed away the words — they tell their own story. Touch them with your fingertips — feel the edges abraded — like scars. Find the traces of lovers — narratives of desire, inscribed across belly and breasts, in hieroglyphics only visible by moonlight.
I’m a complex composition — I’m the stories I’ve read, the stories I’ve written. A lived story, an embodied discourse to be deciphered. Epidermis, dermis and hypodermis — layers of stories that exchange secrets via cells as I sleep.
Turn me in front of a mirror. No matter how I twist, I can’t see all of my stories. I don’t know how I’ll end. I’m a mystery unto myself.
The skin of me is inscribed with stories.
© Melissa Coffey June 2022
Recently, I watched the film “The Professor and the Madman”, based on a novel by Simon Winchester. It tells the story of how the first English dictionary (what’s now known as the Oxford English Dictionary) came into existence. Begun in 1879, its original “editor” James Murray envisaged it would take seven years, but in fact it took seventy. The film beautifully depicts the obsessive fervour the Professor falls into as he begins the daunting task of documenting the history of the English language from A-Z, musing on word after word.
It seemed synchronous that this film found me, as I was already toying with the idea of a prompt that incited you all to explore your feelings about language and your connection with words.
This month’s prompt: How have words written you?
I’ve explored three loosely-connected narratives around language, love of words (logophilia) and story-telling. You could take any of these ideas as starting places. Explore a formative experience with reading or writing, or the moment you first knew you wanted to be a writer. Explore how the act of writing makes you feel — or stage yourself as the story. Reflect on a text about reading or writing. For example, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body was never far from my mind as I was writing this piece — nor were Barthe’s ideas about language. I also enjoyed working with the metaphor of palimpsests. Go postmodern or poetic — or both.
Thanks to Hayden Moore for a little tangential inspiration. In responding to his beautiful lyric essay, I came up with a strange little question that became part of my opening image.
I’m thrilled to be presenting my first prompt for Scrittura! A small confesssion: I rarely do this, but I had to reuse a photo from another piece about labyrinths — a) because I adore this image and b)there were zero interesting images of actual labyrinths.
A big thank you to J.D. Harms for making a little room in his prompt hall of many-splendoured mirrors. As is the tradition in Scrittura, please tag me in your post. As is not the tradition, I may respond to my own prompt. I can’t wait to see what you’ll all come up with (and that includes you, J.D.)!
Tagging our Scintillating Scritturites:
J.D. Harms Jane Smallwood Ilaria Mangiardi Jeff Langley Samantha Lazar Joe Luca Joseph Lieungh Barry Dawson Jr. IV Ann Marie Steele Andrea Juillerat-Olvera Annine Massaro Rowen Veratome Lori Lamothe Laurie Perez Sally A Mortemore Kristie Darling Suzanne V. Tanner Mimi Bordeaux Alice Armour A.X. Bates Paroma Sen Era Garg Josie Elbiry Jenine Bsharah Baines Wry Welwood Danielle Loewen Eleanore Christine Lennie Varvarides Caitlin Rebecca Pablo Pereyra Sydney Duke Richey Sydney J. Shipp Carolyn Riker Caroline Mellor Erika Burkhalter Rachel K. Gause Amy L. Bernstein Zuri Pommerenk Breathe & Be Still Patrick Metzger Josh Lonsdale Georgiana Petec Connie Song Michelle Berry Lane Betsy Denson Niki Madore Mark Tulin Dana Sanford Veronica Haunani Fitzhugh | Creative Jesse M. Gonzalez I am not a Robot Viraji Ogodapola Marilyn J Wolf Rhonda Marrone Enne Baker Roy Reichle allie wisniewski
On the Prose Poem: