"Ligamental"

What does it mean for a body to belong? Can a disability, in Virgil's words, be "mustered into furrows, and with great effort, tamed?" This manuscript explores a young speaker's experience of disability – in particular, a glottal block stutter – through their desire to control their stutter and the physical world. Through agricultural labor on an isolated farm in Maine, she attempts to govern her body and the bodies around her, suppressing her disability along with her burgeoning queerness. She experiences the promise and danger of this approach, along with its eventual failure. And in that failure, we encounter other failures: of the lyric, of the Georgic ideal, of dogmatic morality, of ableist ideas of cure. Part-memoir, part-crip revelation, this manuscript is a prayer toward Jjjjjerome Ellis's invocation: "give me a speech impediment / that I may live."