Wound Care

"I've started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There's a magic here working its way through my veins. There's something about the vegetation too, that I respond to instinctively-- the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of mysterious ceiba trees..." -Cristina Garcia

My VONA Fam

Wound care, I've been doing it all wrong these last few years. I've been treating infected cuticles, bones and finger tips with saline solution, bandages, surgeries, pain killers and warm gloves. But this past week, I realized that wound care begins on the inside.

I knew this. But I didn't really know it. Because the thing is, how can you care for a wound you didn't even know existed? This past week at VONA I became woke to the wounds I had buried so deep I had convinced myself they didn't hurt. But the reason they were buried was because they hurt the most.

I am an open book to anyone who knows me. I will tell you everything about my chronic illness and pain, my miscarriage, my surgeries, the pills I take, how brown and black I feel, how alone I feel as an Afro-Latina in Texas, how much I love my parents and my sister. I laugh off my relationship with my brother. And we laugh when things are uncomfortable. This past week, I was made to confront that discomfort. (And that's all I have to say about that)

A few weeks ago...

And because of that, something truly wonderful happened (aside from the internal healing that began when I wrote the "real hard poem")...my finger (the one I've been trying really hard to save from amputation)...started to scab. I'm not kidding.

Just the week before, while in the DR I was really concerned that the finger was headed back down the ugly rabbit hole of infection and amputation, I just couldn't stay positive when progress wasn't being made. However, when I woke up Saturday morning (I slept for an hour before getting up to catch a 6am flight) the wound actually started to look and feel like a scab that was healing.

That is no coincidence. The poets in my VONA workshop
helped me care for a wound I didn't even know I had self-inflicted. They treated that wound with love, and compassion and understanding and care. And in doing so, the physical wound on my finger has finally decided to heal.

Now

We are only as sick as our secrets. I finally shared one of mine with others. And in that sharing, these people these poets became my family and that space, wherever we all are, became another home.

I am not ready to write about the full extent of my VONA experience, and I don't know that I ever will. But I know that I have been changed. As a writer, a poet, a woman of color, and a survivor. I know now how to care for wounds both big and small and I have a team of caretakers willing to help me through it.