Thursday Poetry Post: The Morning in My Chest
Most days I don't talk about it.
Hello! Once again, we are recognizing NaPoWriMo by looking at a Hattie Jean Hayes original. This poem, The Morning in My Chest, represents the first writing I ever did about my experience with chronic chest pain. You can read more about it here. That essay would not exist without this poem.
We’re going to look at two drafts, then the published poem.
In my first draft, written in late February 2021, I approached this as a prose poem. I remember waking up and, still in bed, writing the first few sentences in a stream of consciousness:
Before I brought this poem to workshop in Elaine Kahn’s Poetry Field School, in March 2021, I reformatted it:
And here’s the final draft, published by Anti-Heroin Chic in December 2021:
There’s an obvious change, right in the beginning: I put us in a body. “The coughing wakes me up” retains some of the ambiguity of the initial first line, from my first drafts. But instead of obscuring what catalyzes the poem – if it’s not a sneeze, then what could it be? – we make the coughing explicit, and blur the idea of ownership. Before getting into the body1 of the poem, there's a sense of questioning who the cough "belongs" to. And we learn it's our narrator because she blesses herself, a departure from the first drafts.
This, I think, centralizes the ideas of isolation/imprisonment that I was writing toward. The theology of this poem is not a salvation-heavy one. Instead, suffering, protection, repentance, and absolution are all contained within an ever-untrustworthy body. To further imply a question of faith, I infused the final draft with more interrogative markers (both in question marks and a stated awareness of others’ lack of understanding). “Most days, I believe” that the pain will eventually go away, but I don’t have a lot of basis in it.
Structurally, much remains the same between the second and final drafts. I keep the “most days” repetition, and I echo it in the final lines about the sunrise. The obvious reason for that is to create a sense of mundanity around the pain, but I also wanted to invoke breathing exercises. Like box breathing, or those relaxation gifs that ask you to “breathe along.”
Reading this poem for the first time in a while, there’s one stanza I might take out, if I were to revise this again. "Nobody knows/about the redeye, six hours trying to decide: was my heart/climbing out?/Or burrowing deeper?" That’s an explicit reference to a trip I took in January 2018, when I was flying from Phoenix to New York and had chest pain so terrible, it gave me a panic attack. I paid eight bucks to sign on to in-flight WiFi and search “heart attack symptoms woman in her twenties????” the whole time. It’s also the flight that ignited my fear of flying, after a college career as a sturdy, phobia-free solo traveler. I don’t think it adds much to this poem, but it’s an interesting little biographical note.
Ultimately, I consider this a poem I needed to write, and made stronger by workshopping/revising. A glance at my Gmail shows I submitted it 18 places before it was accepted, only 10 months after the first draft. Not bad!
Thanks for reading. I’ve really enjoyed pulling back the curtain on my own work. I hope you find it interesting and helpful!
wordplay intentional, no apologies offered