SPARK

Cut

I cut my hand this week and needed a few stitches, no big deal, but it’s made me appreciate my old hand and all the many things it does for me. And I thought of a poem by Sylvia Plath about a time she cut her finger. It’s kind of funny, in a Sylvia Plath way, and I like how she talks to her thumb like it’s a little person. She also uses a few of my favorite words (homunculus, saboteur, babushka). I got nothing but complaints out of my injury; Sylvia turned hers into art.

Cut

For Susan O’Neill Roe

What a thrill—
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian’s axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man—

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump—
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump. 

Poem by Sylvia Plath from the book Ariel. Photo CSU Archive/Everett/Rex features via www.guardian.co.uk

—Kristi