Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).
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Artist’s Statement
I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.
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A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer
company
put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese
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tenure
I trade my body for good company or company more often than not but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway copy room elevator parking lot doesn’t see me if my tit’s not in his mouth when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin and sticky to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch the family I don’t call family because they only love me during second service vacation bible school bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name is a sexual history an untethered novelty so I ask him about his parents but of course they’re dead of course because professor is so many years of being a white man in this world in this grad-student pussy is sixty-five years of asking let’s go to the bedroom
and I am forty fewer of okay
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slow burn
my age always closer to the scotch in his glass
we slow-dance
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I
can’t didn’t don’t
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative body always taking up more space than
it should
he asks again just follow damnit but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself and I know he has a wife at home that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight
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Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.