Celebration

She laughed as she said this, probably because I was in the studio with Robby. If this were a deranged, expensive way of bullying his spouse, I likely would not have joined.

“It’s for a poem she wrote,” said Robby. “The poem is called ‘Celebration,’ and it has a pig in it.

“Well, that’s much cuter,” said Kristen.

The studio where Kristen worked was an airy corner suite of the Cotton Exchange, a cluster of historic downtown buildings that contained creaky wooden floors and a charmingly difficult-to-navigate web of art galleries, clothing stores, and salons. She directed us toward a chair at the back of the studio, set between two massive windows. The afternoon was dark; the sky hung close to the earth. Across the street, the Cape Fear River pushed noiselessly toward the ocean.

Kristen shaved Robby’s right thigh, applied the stencil, rubbed a vaseline-like gel onto a piece of the pig’s outline, and began. When the needle touched his skin, Robby looked over at me and smiled. This was his first tattoo, and I felt honored that it was inspired by a poem I created.

The poem in question was written shortly after I started grad school. It arrived the way most of my favorite poems do: I felt a tug somewhere in my body, sat down, and scribbled out a surprisingly fleshed-out first draft. That draft was called “Vegetarianism” (because I’m bad at titles), but as I revised over the coming weeks, the real name found its way in. Like most of what I wrote in 2018, this poem was about grief. My brother had died four months prior. Loss was all I thought about.

When I look back at my writing from that period, I find it raw and powerful, albeit sometimes frantic. I was operating very close to the source. I moved to Wilmington three days after Stewart was killed, and that first year of grad school had everything: bottomless grief, delightful new friendships, wedding-planning stress, falling in love with a new place, bouts of unbridled rage, learning to surf, navigating my family’s stark new reality. My skin felt like it was outlined in neon. I don’t know how I slept. 

Kristen finished the pig’s outline and started on his fur spots. He would have three spots on his side and two on his thigh. The pig was already very, very cute. He was looking up and smiling, thrilled to be on this specific thigh, wearing this very handsome party hat. Robby’s excitement was palpable. 

I’m a little surprised that the poem “Celebration” is the one Robby connected with most. His most frequent complaint when I share my work with him is: “That one’s sad!” While this particular poem certainly has some levity to it–it’s about the emptiness of life without a person, held next to the joy of their existence at all–there is plenty of sadness within it. But maybe I shouldn’t feel surprised; I think it’s my best poem. It dabbles in surrealism, has good music, and feels well-constructed. It got into a good journal. Though it feels strange and a little rude to applaud my own work, I genuinely love this piece of art I created. And when I look at it, I see myself at twenty-four, full of sorrow and rage and curiosity and joy, desperately trying to make it all mean something. 

If I’m being honest, though, I sometimes fear I’ll never get back to that level–or maybe that feeling–of writing. It’s strange to wax poetic about a time of acute loss. I don’t want to return to that period, and I don’t want to experience this degree of loss ever again. And also, words came easily during that time. I had a lot to say, and a conviction that the things I said mattered. The fact that my favorite poem occurred when I was twenty-four, and I’m now thirty-one, worries me.

“I’m sweating,” said Robby.

“That’s normal,” said Kristen. “Your body is very confused.”

Kristen had moved to the pig’s underbelly, which required tedious shading. Robby tried to hold his facial expression steady as she went over the same tiny piece of skin again and again.

“You’re doing better than ninety percent of the men I tattoo,” said Kristen.

“Do men sit worse for tattoos?” I asked.

She looked at me and smirked. “What do you think?”

Shortly after Stewart passed, the rest of my siblings and I decided to get matching tattoos. In hindsight, I’m shocked we agreed on a design so quickly. We decided on a pentagon to represent the five of us (and because pentagons are present on soccer balls–soccer was Stewart’s calling). Starting from the top of the shape and moving clockwise, we added a parallel line beside the fourth segment; he was number four in the sibling lineup. I chose to get my line in red because Stewart and I both love that color. 

We were all in Charleston at the time, about to go our separate ways after a family beach trip. I found a tattoo artist who had a free hour, and the four of us stopped there on our way out of town. We went in birth order, each getting the shape in a different size and location. Then we hugged in the parking lot, snapped a picture, and headed home in different directions. I wrote my poem not too long after getting that tattoo.

It’s been seven years, and the tattoo has faded. The grief is quieter. I no longer feel like my skin is permanently buzzing. My days are peaceful and happy; my poems aren’t a way to survive. Now, I’m on a mission to rediscover what my poems are. I’m unsure how poetry, this art form I love, should fit into my life. I initially wrote poetry because I felt, as a teenager and early-twenty-something, that the world needed to hear what I had to say. Then, I wrote to process profound grief. Now, accurate or not, I don’t buy into the idea that the world needs my words. I’m not working through a massive life event. Poetry won’t pay my bills, and writing is such a solitary activity that even if I could do it full time, I wouldn’t want to. I’m not writing my heart out; I’m gardening and going to parties and taking walks on the beach.

Kristen put a final touch on the pig’s hoof, snapped some pictures, and secured plastic film over the tattoo. Robby and the pig both beamed.

We walked to one of our favorite bars to celebrate. We each drank a beer under the awning, periodically studying the pig. I peered into his bright little eyes. I wondered if I would write another tattoo-worthy poem in my lifetime. I decided I would. I made a silent commitment to approach my art with more urgency and passion, despite not being in a crisis. Even if my words made no difference in the world at large, they had transformative power in my own life. This little poem helped me through something terrible. I ran a finger softly along the edge of the tattoo’s plastic wrap. Regardless of what poems I do or don’t write in the future, I’m happy to have this one. 

Celebration

I once let a pig, pink and gleaming, into my bed to sleep.
I heard it chuffing in the grass outside and went to fetch it.

It was a full moon. Blades of grass stood rigid
like snowflake spindles. I offered the pig crisp leeks

and a ripe tomato. She looked in my eyes. She sniffed
my palms, sucked citrus and skin into her snout.

I lived alone when this happened. I never told anyone
how her fat-padded back curled into me like a question,

or that I woke to her wet snout on mine. I named her,
took her to the door in the morning, never saw her again.

The night we slept together, she waited until I arrived
in that gentle, mossy place between worlds and whispered

one inch from my ear. Her voice sounded deep and whole;
I pictured my mother thumping her palm against cantaloupes

at the grocery store, listening for a note that would tell her
the shade of orange inside. The pig murmured that her mother’s

milk could have dripped straight from the moon. I don’t know why
she told me; perhaps loneliness had settled in her belly, bubbling

deep and slow. Mine started in the elbows, swinging
from bone to bone: humerus to clavicle, down the scapula.

It zipped along each rib like electricity. Maybe the pig
was simply wading through her own half-dream.

But the endlessly dense hooves of her, the verdant
garden breath of her, the water-smooth armpits and

left glistening ear of her, moon-christened, told me
this night was a celebration of having someone to miss.