Apple = Vagina – An Interview with Lisa Tellor-Kelley

Lisa Tellor-Kelley’s poetry collection ‘My Body Bonded with Superglue,’ published by Animal Heart Press is a woman’s journey through diagnosis, treatment, and healing of breast cancer. The poet takes us on the emotional and physical voyage of having breasts removed and coming to terms with what that means for personal identity, female identity, and sexuality. More than a narrative of this experience, it is a fiercely assertive and powerful voice that articulates and kicks hard against the fears of breast cancer patients, particularly the 70% who lose their partners after surgery.

Through our conversation, Lisa breezed through these heavy themes with a lightness that was inspiring, courage that seemed effortless, and certainty that love from your friends and family, but above all, for yourself, will get you through. By interrogating concepts of female agency, sexuality, and illness, she loudly speaks of things many of us are afraid to say. Our journey to meet these challenges seems no more apparent to me than the reflection that I have never seen an equivalent poetry collection about a man working through testicular cancer, and holding onto his sexuality. As a society, maybe we all have a lot to learn from this collection about self-love.

 

CC: Let’s start at the beginning. Your first poem ‘Girl in Chemise’ is a great metaphor for art. You seem to play a lot with the idea of the artist’s gaze, the male and also the female gaze. How do your ideas of identity and wholeness fit into that?

LTK: I didn’t think much about the gaze, but I was looking for something ekphrastic; something from a painting to do with breasts. In my research, I came to Picasso and his blue-green period which seemed to fit emotionally. And what you say about the gaze, well it is him looking at the subject and catching the single breast that he found it intimate. You know, you’re making me think about that gaze idea even though it wasn’t something I was addressing and that’s a good thing, right? How does a man look at a woman and that one breast? Were there two, but only one was visible? But it resonated with me; I had to make that choice when the doctors found cancer and I took both off because I didn’t want to have to go through surgery twice. This poem was about me honestly looking at myself, a female gaze; what do I see, how will I interpret what is left. After the surgery, I looked in the mirror and there was nothing but two white lines. I said; there are no stitches, and they said, no you’re glued together, you’re bonded with superglue.

CC: Wow, so that’s where the title of the whole collection comes from.

LTK: Yes ma’am. You talk about the female gaze, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking I’m never going to see these breasts again and I loved my breasts. In fact, for my twentieth anniversary, I had pictures made of them, which I used to reconstruct my breasts after surgery. I think if we as women lose a piece of us, we do gaze. Because women are beautiful, we have gorgeous bodies, but if there is a female gaze there, it means nothing more than that the body is a beautiful piece of art.

CC: A lot of what you’re saying is about identity. How much do you consider being a woman and therefore having breasts to be a part of your identity?

LTK: For me, it’s no different from losing my hand and I’m a writer. I guess you learn how to mourn that loss. I worked with a woman that told me she thought I was letting womanhood identify me. I said no, I’m just gonna miss them, but I’ll get over it. I am a sensual woman, I liked the intimacy my husband had with me and my breasts. So the difficult thing in that case if you lose them is then where do you go? Well, everything that was in front transferred and I found a new way of intimacy. But did it identify me, did it stop me from being sexual and being loved, no, I don’t think so. There are women that love having their breasts kissed, I did. Now I love having my back kissed. It’s just as intimate.

CC: You use caesura and enjambment a lot, you seem to separate ideas and block them off. Is that a conscious choice?

LTK: Yes, a hard choice; I want to get two meanings from one line. I had a professor once who challenged me to place a period into the middle of the line and still make that line make sense. I loved the challenge and it’s become my signature now, where and how a line breaks can catch people off guard.

CC: That struck me in ‘Bra Beginnings’ in your last stanza you say ‘I am 35/ years older,’ I found that powerful because it emphasized that gap, as you say, you do catch the reader off guard.

LTK: Thank you! It’s so much a part of me now that when someone speaks when I’m teaching, when my mother-in-law telling me a recipe, I’ll hear something that could be a double entendre if it’s broken a certain way, and I think – oh, I’ve got to write this down! On my window here are all these sticky notes with those lines, I hear a line and run in here to write it down!

CC: You seem to use an image of numerology, a constant mythologizing of the numbers one, two, and zero – particularly in ‘Moving left on the number line.’ Tell me about that?

LTK: I used numbers because numbers make me feel uncomfortable. Numbers are miserable! And two – I did a painting that was supposed to be flowers in a field, and they were all circles within a circle. A friend told me, you have doubles of everything in there!

CC: So, is that always coming back to doubling, and two breasts and getting your head around removing one or two?

LTK:Yeah, it is, and I had my breasts rebuilt and I love them, but as I get older, I think there may be a time that I’ll have them removed, and I probably not rebuilt. I’m settling into who I am even more and it’s ok. But I will tell you that I was terribly frightened because I read an article that said 70% of women lose their husbands.

CC: Is that something you discussed with your husband?

LTK: Absolutely. But he said I’d much rather have you than your breasts! And the poem ‘I recommend healing to a Bollywood Beat,’ is about dancing which was another thing I used to find sexuality. Being alone in a room, turning on your favorite music, letting your body move, just feeling sexy for yourself. Once I could do that, I broke free. So now, I could take my breasts off and still feel sexy. I did Belly dancing before, and it’s fun, it’s seductive. And I don’t think breasts are the only thing that is sexy! I mean, hips, oh my goodness!

CC: The hips don’t lie, Lisa.

LTK: No, they do not!

CC: I’d like to talk about food imagery now, is that sensual too? Poems like ‘a Poet’s Prescription,’ ‘Boys who wear white enjoy eating red’ and ‘Cupping Coffee’ all dribble with delicious things!

LTK: I think it comes from the relationship between me and my husband. We have always said, good food leads to a wonderful evening of intimacy. To me, food is sexy. You know, I didn’t realize how sexy until one day at university we were challenged by a professor to write a description. Mine was about an apple, but it ended up as the blossom, food nonetheless. I took it to a workshop, and someone read it and brought it back with the word VAGINA splayed across it! And I said yes, that’s where I was going! I think I find sex in food. I can’t help it, I find sex in nature all the time. Guilty!

CC: That fits with your flower imagery too. In ‘18000 Folds Close Heaven Gates’ you have a bouquet, foxglove, cherry blossom, there are roses in ‘Moving Left on the Number Line’ and ‘We Are Born Again,’ there are vines, purple butterfly pea flower, petals! Do you find flowers sensual?

LTK:I do, and it comes back to that idea that I find nature intimate. My mother grew up in southern Illinois, in the days when you just went out and found things, discovered and learned what they were. She passed this on to us.

CC: I suppose cherry blossom has a lot of virginal imagery too, which is not so much the perspective of an actualized, sexual woman – you’re more the apple, oh no, I’m back to the vagina apple!

LTK: I’ve ruined you, I’m sorry!

CC: From apples to Eden, you use a lot of religious imagery. Esther’s story was one I found interesting. Was faith part of your healing?

LTK: Faith is something I grew up with. Esther was a biblical story my father read to me, and it made me realize women have strength. My father taught me to be assertive.

CC: ‘We are Born Again’ was another of my favorite poems; ‘We have been/ to the spring, filled our empty mouths/ with ‘I am.’ – Fuck what a good line, Lisa!

LTK: It’s one of my favorites! This also comes from my yearly trips with my girlfriends, us saying to ourselves ‘am I enough.’ But it was that double entendre again, we’re filling ourselves with God, with faith, and with I Am Enough, to survive.

CC: You talk about one of those trips in your poem ‘Binding Wounds with a Pink Ribbon.’ It all gets a bit pagan with ribbons, trees, and cider. That was great!

LTK: Right! It’s about healing with each other, letting go of things and apples, again! Even if an apple has a spot or is blighted in some way, underneath there’s still the juicy flesh, something to bite into, there’s still life to quench our thirst. We heal each other. Some women I know that had the same cancer I did are almost five years out of their operation, and their husbands have never seen them. I want these women to understand they’re still goddesses. Their men still love them. And I bet you any money they want to see their wife, I’m surprised they don’t ask, maybe they’re scared.

CC: Maybe they don’t want to push it with a woman who’s dealing with that trauma, they want to let her move at her own pace?

LTK: Right, but my husband would! When I had tubes coming out of me, my husband put me in the shower and bathed me so slowly, he never found one inch of me ugly. I try to share that with the women that go through this, your men don’t care, they love you, or they wouldn’t be there still.

CC: Do you think that 70% of women who lose a partner after surgery that it’s coming from the women, not the men? From their sense of shame or disfigurement?

LTK:That’s a good question. I know women are shamed. But it’s also society – we never see a model in the world without breasts. It’s that gaze. People don’t find beauty in breastless women, but fuck that, there is. A breast is just flesh that needs to be removed, it’s trying to kill us for god’s sake, the rest of us is whole.

CC:That was an image you use in ‘Skin Jacketing his Paper Doll,’ that double image of your beautiful breasts but at the same time, they, as you put it, ‘tried to kill me.’

LTK:The doctors did make me feel an urgency about it. Normally with this type of cancer, you need chemo, surgery, and radiation. But because we did it so early, I didn’t need those. The ‘Red Devil’ in my poems is the name of the strongest cancer treatment available; many of my girlfriends had it. That reference is a nod to them. Dance, drink, do whatever you have to do to get through the red devil!

CC: Coming to terms with ‘being a sick person’ must be a huge mental strain too.

LTK:It is! But everyone was so good to me. There was a community, my women were there for me. They brought me dinners, my cannabis, made sure I was in good condition to smoke! I was a Cannabis smoker before, and I think it helped me. It can shut your pain off without masking it too deeply and I think sometimes your body needs to feel how you’re feeling.

CC: You mention hashish in ‘A Poet’s Prescription’ – ‘speak of pricey/ ice wine, hashish, smoked/ meats, and imported beers.’ Good times, Lisa!

LTK: It was. I promise you!

CC: Another question: The hardest question. Your poems portray a marvelously healthy sex life, despite what you’ve gone through and having to re-understand your body. You healed through sex. What if you’re already not a very sexual couple, or you’re single; what’s your advice?

LTK:You have to be good to yourself. This is where dancing comes in again. Love yourself, go to dinner. If you don’t want to eat alone, take your best girlfriend with ya, she’ll understand. Then, you know, you can come home and be intimate. Damn, I know, shocking. But that’s society, not us. Women are always wicked or disgusting, and that’s not fair. Women aren’t allowed to be sexual goddesses and we live in a false reality; a world that says, be a virgin and fuck me. I stopped a student in my class once who used the word whore about a woman. There isn’t a negative word for a man that enjoys his sexuality, and that’s not fair. Love your body. Look in the mirror and find the beauty in what you have. It’s there. And if you’re single and going through a cancer like mine, find your best friend, a confidant. You need that, it’s hard to do this journey alone. If you have to make it alone, geez, google, there are all kinds of people to find on the internet now! Mainly, people are kind, for all the bullshit you get. I had a lot of women upset with me because I got my breasts put back on, but it wasn’t their decision. It’s personal, and we shouldn’t judge other women for what they need. If I needed my breasts to make me feel whole, that’s ok. And if I didn’t, that’s ok, too! It’s all health, not just cancer health. So, love yourself. And I’m telling you, it’s hard, you’ll have days when you get knocked down, but you have to just get up. You’ve made me think about someone being alone, I would hate for that to happen. I’d go in search of a group then. But love yourself.

 

 

**Lisa Tellor-Kelley won the 2015 State of Illinois Emerging Writer’s Award. Previously, she was an English composition lecturer at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and a creative writing lecturer at Lindenwood University-Belleville, IL. Lisa is the name giver of the River Bluff Review literary journal at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her poems have been published in OVS-Organs of Voice & Speech, South Broadway Ghost Society, Assisi: Journal of Arts and Letters, and The River Bluff Review. Currently, she spends her time writing poetry, indulging in rich food and drink while living in rural Southern Illinois.

Photo by Maria Strom from FreeImages