This Body I’m a fact, a series of toes accented with slates of toenails, and a ripple of blue branches leading wrist to knuckles, each an island of bone-hiding lines and codes. I’m also a tilted neck enmeshed with a disappearing chin, a happy camper, and a total ass. My brain is wine-stained without drinking any wine, heavy with just-picked apples of urgencies or distracted rightfully by blue wings disappearing into the cedars of the tail winds I breathe. I’m this and the imprint of holding newborns while the ice outside cracks off branches and I fall asleep again crookedly. I’m one working eye and a companion riding blind, together taking in the chlorophyll like the yellowing leaves, all parts of us appreciating what will fall. I’m still a matched set of thighs wanting to hold golden secrets between them, an assemblage of kneecaps with complementary saucers, and shoulders ready for lift up or collapse around my shamed heart. I used to be a mixed set of breasts but they left the building for the sake of the company’s bottom line. Under the skin, nothing is symmetrical balancing on the juggling spine along with all the water and capillaries branching their necessary roadways to the heart while the real trees crested overhead laugh like they own me, which they will one day.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 23 books, including Miriam’s Well, a novel; Everyday Magic: A Field Guide to the Mundane and Miraculous, and Following the Curve, poetry. Her previous work includes The Divorce Girl, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet, a bioregional memoir on cancer and community; and six poetry collections, including the award-winning Chasing Weather with photographer Stephen Locke. Founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 