Tag: body

My grandmother asks what size my dress is by Lucy De Maio

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My grandmother asks what size my dress is

I want to tell her, infinity. The biggest number.
The sum of every meal I’ve missed. The total count
of every bone in my body that weakened when starved,
thinning into things just as destructive as they were
destroyed. A value greater than every time she’s asked.
An irrational number, one that spirals like we both do,
one that oscillates to the point of collapse. The kind of
number that you don’t even know how to read aloud.
A number so towering and imaginary you can feel it
encroaching on your space, your brain, that little corner
that does the calculating, the panicking, tracks the hours
wasted wondering if the limit exists, if one can approach zero.
A number no one will discover. The result of adding the tags
of every dress I’ve ever bought, every unflattering waist
I’ve regretted. The sum of every sliver of shallow hope
born from flat morning stomachs. The product given by
multiplying instability with ignorance, the kind that
unconditional love can never excuse. The quantity
measured when you stack up every minute we two have
drained thinking about our bodies instead of living in them.
The number you get when you trace the family tree,
adding up every woman sucking in her abdomen in the
photo, hoping the universe will swallow it, hoping her
daughter granddaughter great granddaughter won’t have to
twist in her torso too— not hoping that she won’t.

*

Lucy De Maio is Chicago Youth Poet Laureate 2026. She loves poetry that reclaims heritage, art that explores what it means to live in a body, and anything about trains.

The Body by Dana Henry Martin

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The Body

Red the blood, blue the blood,
on entry, on exit, like a color song.

Pools of red turning maroon,
turning carmine.

The room is piss yellow,
the nurses green as shoots,

vertical, a moving jungle.
They want what they can’t have:

my death. I want what I can’t have:
my life. We are all swimming

in this lavender water, this gray air.
I ask for oxygen and get sulfur.

I ask for silence and get tinnitus.
My cells explode into calligraphy

that’s dripping. It’s a language
my paginated body cannot hold.

::

I see your body unraveling
in the hall. I almost said

unravening, unleavening,
unleveling. All true. I know

because I’m you. Pretty flower.
Pretty nude. Who taught you

to petal? To move toward
any open door? They’re already

calling you a whore. Broken stem.
Busted seed. Gown down

around your waist. That
everywhere hair. There’s

nothing beyond the frame.
Those stairs lead nowhere.

Leaves like hands.
Carpet like a tongue.

You are so young, Child.
You are already flung.

::

She and her maid
were transformed,

all brutality and body,
brought as close to God

as any man. Not a drop
of blood on their dresses,

not an inch of space
between their intentions.

Knife like a cross but
him like something else.

He begged them to stop.
As if. Gentileschi put them

in the good light, oiled
Holofernes’s blood

until it shone. Painted
the knife more than halfway

through the neck,
Judith’s hand knuckling

his head in place as she
cut clean through skin,

then muscle, then vein,
then nerve, then cartilage

and back in the opposite
order. After she split

the Adam’s apple,
she sliced the carotid

in two like a worm.
Gentileschi showed

Judith’s cleavage,
flush cheeks, rippled

sleeves, dark ribbons,
well-muscled arms,

her fingers, her wanting.
Gentileschi showed it all:

how it was, how it had to be.
How it will be forever.

—

These are sections from a long poem titled “The Body.” Each of these sections is ekphrastic. The first is after Joan Mitchell’s Faded Air 1, the second after Dorothea Tanning’s Sunflower in the Hall, and the third after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. Allison Blevins provided the artwork as inspiration for these poems in her workshop titled “Writing with Pain: A Generative Workshop on Illness and Disability.”

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).

A Body Wholly Body by Jeff Newberry

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A Body Wholly Body

There is order in the way the nurse calls
me back to the scale, where I step
up to be weighed and therefore judged.
I’m taken to a small room to await
the coming doctor—sans plague mask—
who enters with on light feet
and sits, taps a clipboard, and prophesies
my future of fat, my heart, my veins
thick with cholesterolled sludge.
The heart beats. The blood pumps.
The pricked index tells my story
of late-night snack cakes and long
afternoons spent, legs crossed, a book
on my lap instead of placing one foot
in front of the other on a track or street.
My body is bonded and printed
on neat white paper. My body
is signed and directed to a lab
where a bored nurse draws more blood.
Everything lined, sketched, and charted.
Tell me, if you know, my doctor,
why the pale light of this exam room
and the cold steel of the exam table
call to mind a chilly January
when they laid my father in a coffin.
Tell me why when I look back
on that day, I remember nothing
save silence and the weight of a body
laid low, sinking down into the earth.

*

Jeff Newberry’s most recent book is the hybrid collection Frames: A Memoir (Another New Calligraphy). His writing has appeared in a number of print and online publications, recently appearing in Stone Circle Review, Sursurrus, and Sugar House Review.

At Home in the Body by Robbi Nester

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At Home in the Body

My cousin is a dancer, while I have always
lived too much in my mind. When I visited,
she dragged me to a belly-dancing lesson.
In the dim light, women in clouds of scented oil
swayed like palm trees, cymbals crashing
on each finger, arms coiling overhead.
They could say so much with just the slightest
bird-tilt of the head, move as though each muscle
had a mind—rictus abdominus, obliques, erector
spinae, pelvic floor, and more. At the sight, my body
stalled, so my cousin tied a folded scarf over my eyes,
blinding me to faltering. I became a leopard, muscles
a rippling stream beneath the skin.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of 5 books of poetry and editor of 3 anthologies. She currently curates and hosts two monthly poetry reading series on Zoom and acts as contributing editor on a new journal, The Odd Pocket Review. Learn more about her work at robbinester.net

Three Poems by Connie Post

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Maps

I no longer want
Google map directions

I want to stop at a local gas station
where the people know
how to get somewhere

I will buy a cold root beer
where the soda slightly spills out
the top of the lid

I want someone to understand
the loss of my tire pressure
and for someone to understand
that I’ve forgotten how
to pop the hood

I want the attendant
to tell me why the road
washed out last year

when I search for the money
to pay for my drink and Fritos

I want them to wait a long time
until my purse is an open cavern

I want them to see how long
I can stand there as a half shadow

I want them to see
there is a drought in my mouth

mostly
I want someone to know I’m lost

*

My Body is a Content Warning

The papers and files
are all boxed up

nobody wants to read my bones

these fractures didn’t just happen
overnight

nobody is willing to
sit with my marrow
in a room filled with
crumpled police tape

there is an empty can of mace
in my sleeve

I’ve never used it

all my offenders know me

the only stranger danger is
is my shadow self
sitting on the chair in my room

my body is surrounded
by the weeds of childhood

how many times must
I be told to take better care of myself

how many times
must I cauterize my subconscious

how many times
do I have to remind myself
that my memory
is an untreated hemophiliac

I don’t know how many more ways
to sacrifice this body

the gods are hungry

*

Sleeping With the Light On

You didn’t mean to
but you were too tired

maybe you took one pill too many

maybe daylight savings time
wanted you to exile yourself

most likely though

you didn’t want to find another
curtain in the dark

where the fibers hang like long strands
of your remaining sanity

they were hung
with the crippled hands of a mad man

the curtains
are a tripping hazard
they hang just low enough
to force you to feel
the partial existence
of your makeshift life

as dawn arrives
you erase the word “rape”
from a piece of crumpled paper
by the side of your bed

you get up early
and go to the department store
about ten miles away

you walk around
finding mannequins
that emulate the very expression
you had
when he found you

*

Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, & Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her second full length book, “Prime Meridian” was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press) and was a finalist for the 2020 Best Book Awards. Her most recent books are Between Twilight from New York Quarterly Books and Broken Metronome from Glass Lyre Press. Broken Metronome was the winner of the American Fiction Award for poetry chapbook.

A Body That Is Shared by Jen Gayda Gupta

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A Body That Is Shared

It is not my body, ketamine and acid infused,
mushroom bathed, dopamine depleted. I am on
the other side of the country, laying in bed while
my sister sobs into the light, watches the cacti bleed
by her car window as a man who refuses to love her
all the way drives them to a home I have never seen.

The phone chimes black and white shapes that mean
I’m okay but I am already there, each bump under
their tire vibrates through my skull. She is crying
one thousand seven hundred miles away and her tears
sweat out of my palms. After she brushes her teeth,
she blows her nose and a sneeze wakes me.

In the morning we are drained, our chests house
depleted balloons. She puts on a pair of scrubs, packs
her things and lifts a mask to her face while I raise
my computer screen. Our hands reach our coffee mugs
and her cuticles bleed, my finger wrapped
for a moment in her silver ivy ring.

Yesterday, I had a good day until she didn’t,
migraine blooming long before she called.
This never being alone is nice until it’s sad and then
it’s just sad for two. We feel like breaking a table,
like opening the earth, like chewing our own skin.

I tell her she should lay off the drugs,
that they don’t help, but I leave out the way they depress
me. It’s annoying to tell someone what to do
with their body even if it’s a body that is shared.

The moment my sister was born, my throat opened
like I finally figured out how to breathe. Today we wait
for the stomachs to settle, the invincible hum to pass.
I lay my head on a pillow and feel the curves of her lap.

*

Jen Gayda Gupta is currently on the run from responsibility, living nowhere at all with her husband and their dog. She enjoys big mountains and tiny spoons. Her work has been published in Dodging the Rain, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, Wrongdoing and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.

Two poems by Nicole Caruso Garcia

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Sijo for Two Sparrows

Two sparrows are beak-deep in
        tire-flattened rest stop French fries,
more or less content to peck
        an ecstasy of sun-warmed trash
here beside the Jersey Turnpike,
        when they could fly anywhere.

*

What Were You Wearing?

Because the body is a temple,
I wore the wakeful song of birds,
Lay safe beside my lover, still.

Because the body is a temple,
When he trespassed like a vandal,
I had no robe but words.

Because the body is a temple,
I wore the wakeful song of birds.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia is Associate Poetry Editor at Able Muse and a Board member at Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. Her poems appear in Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Light, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, PANK, Plume, The Raintown Review, Rattle, RHINO, Sonora Review, Spillway, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.