Dear 2019 and the years before that,

I learned that the color of a bruise is synonymous to the sky right before a storm. And just like the sky, the body can thunder and lightening itself until it is unrecognizable.

There are billions less birds flying above us. Instead of the flapping of wings, we hear clouds tangle and cough like flu victims. I walked around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and lost count of the humans wearing face masks. I held my breath for as long as I could. What are we really breathing in?

Blame it on the squall.

I learned that articulating the correct pronoun can save a life.

Sometimes the most difficult decision one can make in a day is to turn off their Internet.

Sometimes the second most difficult decision one can make in a day is to exist for twenty-four hours and post zero photographs of what you ate.

Learned how to embroider; learned how to walk outside; learned I can stay inside; learned how to say no; learned how to leave without causing a scene; learned how to sit still (even if just for five minutes); learned how to approach my body (carefully, as though we are meeting each other for the first time);

I still have no idea who I am.

On January 1st, I will not eat differently.

On January 1st, I will not join a gym.

On January 1st, my scars will not erase themselves away.

On January 1st, I will have still done that.

Haruki Murakami wrote, “Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”

I learned that I don’t have to forget all of this, but I don’t have to carry it every day. I can live amidst war, even when it is inside me. I can search for peace amidst the screams and slashings.

Sometimes, just saying hello to a stranger can save a life or at least remind each other that we are visible even when we are not trying to be.

The inside of my body is like a buffet/ but all the containers are empty

Dear Rebel,

I write to you because when we speak, all my words come out in the exact shape as it lives inside me. Everywhere else, my letters bulge and bend inaccurately. My teeth slur. My knees shiver so loudly that nothing else can be heard.

Have you ever been pronounced correctly? What does that feel like. I hosted a party inside my body the other night. No one came; no one else was invited. There were snacks but nothing was touched. Actually, handfuls were taken, but then everything just turned to dust.

My body is a dust storm of uncertainty.

When I was a child, my favorite food was: buffet. All-you-can-eat with more choices than I could ever need. I didn’t have to choose just one option. I’ve never just been one option. I could sample the flavors I was unfamiliar with, maybe even declare something new as my favorite.

Couldn’t bodies, can’t gender, can’t identities be like buffets? An all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of choices and possibilities? I may be in the mood for mac and cheese today, but tomorrow, I may desire beef stew or vegetable lo mein.

Do all these choices have to define me? How are my choices, how is my appearance defining me?

Dear Rebel, my hair has nothing to do with my gender identity. It is long now, gets caught in zippers and, at night, it tries to strangle me. What if I am just this mix-and-match unmatched being?

What if my only declaration is: I have nothing to declare.

I am trying to empty all this out. All of this. All of me. Rinse and repeat.

The inside of my body is like a buffet. But all the containers are empty. And I am searching for what I want to eat now.

on the road pt. 3

“The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something – a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.” – Paul Theroux

First semester of graduate school and my professor asks us to state our name and where home is. These literary-soaked strangers name places on the west coast, in the middle and a few from the south. I hadn’t lived in many places, but none really felt like home to me and what does home even look like. So instead, I thought about the place I knew the best but felt at home in the least: my body. My professor was not impressed, a little confused and asked about a place on the map. I said it again: my body. He made that sound men make when they just want you to concede.

We collect stamps in passport books and catalogue our trophies from everywhere we’ve traveled: post cards, shot glasses, magnets, t-shirts. But what about the markings on a body. That bullet-shaped hole beside my knee from challenging, beautiful, love-soaked canoe trip in Canada; blisters on feet from all that walking in Amsterdam; sunburn and hair loss and sore throat and those pants from that thrift store.

What will be discovered today? What will be lost? What will be mailed back? Someone will say a prayer for a part of the body that never felt like it belonged, so trained hands will scalpel and remove and sew and send home a body that now looks familiar, only bloodied and bruised and tender and right.

Someone else will stand beside that person and wonder what else can be removed. Wonder if one can create a gofundme page for a brain that is soaked in sadness.

Many years later and “my body” is still the answer when asked about where home is. Welcome mat long gone (did it ever exist?), windows stained, door hinges rusty and squeaked, quite a bit of hoarding. No, I guess there is no map with my body’s coordinates plainly presented, but not everything that we (want to) believe in can be seen.

 

It

It was easier to do it myself,

press it firmly between thumb and pointer

pull out its uncertain taste buds

a planet of blood takes its place.

Or I could wait my turn–

as the rest of the women wait on line

each one, sucking on pliers

tongues torn out like paper.

If I am to be silenced,

I much prefer to do it myself

so I swallow my tongue

before they snatch it away,

digesting every word, every protest

every scream sewed into the muscle

still living inside me.

How Many Outlets Do You Need to Plug in a Body

Bodies are appliances (plugged in, burnt, stained and bent, infested with mice). Like poems, they stir. What do we become when we are no longer present-tense singular. What I mean is, when the past drapes around necks, trauma choke hold, and the past becomes bits of swollen teeth biting and bruising. Rot. 

Or what I am trying to get at…a body is anthologized with several editors (some un-cited), disordered chapters, an offensive misspelling on page twenty-seven. 

So you place body on shelf. If it matters enough to you, you alphabetize, you catalogue. You forget its there.

Insert dust mites, black mold, cobwebs of broken fingernails and flakes of skin.

You consider taking it off the shelf to read again or (let’s be honest) to read for the first time through. You get comfortable. Sip the tea you’ve steeped. Chew on the biscuits you’ve fanned out on snack tray. Chapter one is too boring. Chapter seven is too dark. You decide to skip to the end, but it is a run-on sentence which began several chapters before. Your tea spills, the biscuits are so dry, you feign a choke. You realize that to understand this body, you must read all its parts. Even the messy, awkwardly worded ones. So you dig your bones further into couch cushions.

This will be awhile.

Body Luggage

The body is a suitcase. Too cheap to check, more like a carry on. Contraband bone break, too many slaughtered commitments to call it high quality. Chipping, peeling at the corners. Pockmarked and sunburnt and chapped leather (faux). Go on, try and carry this. Go on, try calling it designer or throw back. The handles have been pulled out of shape. There are no pockets, zipper stuck, it cannot lock any longer. Looks like another break in. Go on and report it. Body luggage lost somewhere between moss and sky. There is insurance for times like these, but who can afford that, nowadays?

Rush Hour

Woman on 6 train / stares at my arms as though / they are dear john letters

Written during ages 16 through 35 / the lines are like weeping relationships / blockading skin

Some so deep / you can hear the ghosts of caskets / preparing

A Run-On of Deficiencies

And knee pads as footsteps are not enough

And carved out broken bedsprings are not enough

And Woolf and Lorde and Hurston and Baldwin are not enough

And wound shape comparison, whistle sharps are not enough

And spoons burnt from below are not enough

And museums and meditation, not enough

And reoccurring dreams of hostage not enough

And the sex you think you shouldn’t be having, not enough

And cage. And babies. And babies in cages. Not enough.

And the reason your body odors and resistance. Not. Enough.

And hymns. And disbelief. And disbelieving hymns. Not enough.

And liberated spines and discounted lacerations and everything we choke on that cannot be deciphered. Not. Enough.

And incubators and incubating and departments. Depart. Mental. Isms.

Not. Enough.

The Sum of Calendars

I am trying to let go of something

–Tracy K. Smith

 

It feels like cold sore body gristle cracked molar memory of sixteen to nineteen

Misshapen elastic mourning its taut, its firm, its locked box casing

It feels like that time you learned Lucille Ball died while on the way to family Thanksgiving or Grandma’s grave or synagogue or some other place that triggered loneliness

You awake from a dream where all your teeth have been replaced with slurs. You try to sound out help or hungry or not now but all that comes out are four letter words bleeped out on the radio

Remember when your body was new. A gift-wrapped holiday. Upright and without all its springs popped. Yesterday, your veins started scratching their way out of each thigh. Morse code of aging. You want to call them beautiful; all that comes out is malnourished spider legs.

You are trying to let go of something. Of every organ which has grown slightly off-kilter. Of your misshapen brain, congealed due to improper adolescence. Of every time your welcome mat was set on fire.

One day, you will go on a bike ride. Your ears will be unplugged, just waiting to surf over wind and traffic. You will notice that your muscles can take you away but also bring you back home. You will lose your breath but something inside you will locate more. You will cry because every time your body moves, it remembers. It remembers. You may howl because sometimes you feel like a cone snail or a saltwater crocodile but you just can’t seem to commit to danger, so you keep pedaling. With every block, you let go. Back there, fingerprints from that time. Three pounds of hair, a partially lobotomized fingernail, some skin ready to flee, spit, all gone. You are something else; you are everything you were; you are nothing from before; you are all of it; the sum of calendars. You are still here. As you check your imaginary rearview window, you can see its blur miles behind you. You really wanted to let go. You were really hoping it wouldn’t follow. So you keep pedaling; you keep panting; you keep pushing your way out of __________ .

Loaded

dear gun,

every weapon that I’ve ever touched

grows on my body.

I think it’s time you put yourself away now.