Christina Pugh

from The Right Hand
 

She said she saw her own veins
branching when she closed her eyes:
the eyelid’s imprint like a cloth
crazed in cross-stitch. Or thatched,
I tried to think. Then closed my own
eyes to find my inner eyelid. It’s not
very starry. It is not even color.
It’s the closest my body
comes to the conceptual.

from The Right Hand
 

Maya Lin made a river out of pins.
The pins on the wall marked the Hudson’s movements.
Like a battlefield, or a soul pierced by arrows.
When the pins clustered thickly, like crescendo in music–
This was where the wall was wounded deepest.
 
 

To interrupt pain feedback loops, try writing with your non-dominant hand.
 

At night, I tried to write with my right hand.
My pen stubbed the paper, then trailed leggy
glyphs on squares. I copied lines, Whose woods
these are. And 1, 2, 3, 4: primary numbers.
The curviest letters were the hardest thing–
I skittered half a gambrel roof to try to end
an h. Such ungainly posture in my wilting
fingers as they trudged the weird
frontier of the page. My wrist had to
double back, sniffing with its snout.

Author: Christina Pugh

Christina Pugh is the author of six books of poems, including The Right Hand (Tupelo Press, 2024) and Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize in Poetry. In 2024, she also published a book of essays on poetry titled Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century (University of Michigan Press “Poets on Poetry” series, 2024), which was a recommended book in Choice.  Her poems have appeared widely, including in The Atlantic, Poetry, Yale Review, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow in poetry, she has also received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and others.  She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was recently named Distinguished Scholar of the Year in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture.  Her website is christinapughpoet.com.

Plume: Issue #111 November 2020