The gravid ground: stories of bed and street

Abstract

Entangled with the complexity of Jennifer Bloomer's creative/theoretical ideas on chickens, beds, eggs, birth, and time, this essay is a ‘poetic/politic'1 dialogue between interior and exterior, private and public, health and illness. As gendered, cultural and personal, the place of illness is politically controversial to Western culture — taboo even — with ill bodies absented from public life. The essay illuminates this absenting. If health crises, rather than passively intersecting racial or gender inequalities, develop in a cycle of ‘co-constitution', their unravelling necessitates identifying threads through both personal and political storytelling.2 This essay asserts that who or what stories make present, then, has valence. I present three poetic/politic threads. The first, ‘insides', from experiences of being confined during the Covid-19 pandemic, tells the backstory of the bed, entering a playful journal dialogue with Bloomer, chickens and ill health. The second story, ‘outsides', moves out into the street where ground is bed and, overhearing the stories of others, considers the story as a potential delicate, minor resistance and restoration in public space or the urban landscape. The third story, ‘inside out’, rather than a conclusion, offers a composting of material for new beginnings.