Tag: body

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.