“The canvas I now inhabit is blank, healed.”
a poem by Margaret Campbell
Mildred Yockey and Claire Campbell, two sisters, 1975.
Like the p’s in psoriasis and pneumonia,
I was a silent child.
Like the exhausted Oklahoma topsoil,
always under foot.
Like my smooth alabaster elbow,
unnoticed till I came unhinged.
The unpronounced, the downtrodden, the ignored
rise up eventually.
The p’s migrate to parched, pain, peril, and peace.
A scorched earth catches the wind.
A drought comes to a woman’s elbow.
“The surface of the earth crusted,”
Steinbeck wrote, “a thin hard crust”;
and the soil cried out for rain.
Once your skin becomes your enemy,
it is like the dust you will return to,
storming up from your bones
to bury your breath.
A small patch of foe skin
spreads everywhere.
I scratched until I bled.
It felt good to bleed,
to break through thirsty skin
to the olecranon process,
a half-moon of pain.
Forty years of scales and scabs,
my dust bowl lasted.
John Updike went to war with his skin.
I yearned to molt, to be a snake, to flay myself.
The canvas I now inhabit is blank, healed.
At your beautifully set table, on heirloom white linen,
I lean my polished elbows, a perfect W,
not to be rude or ungrateful,
not to take up more space
than I deserve,
but to ask why
I have suffered so.
old charcoal drawing by Lauren Kindle, c. 2014
The Dust Bowl of My Elbow
Margaret A. Campbell
Published originally in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) January 2014
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