“Sometimes, having a body feels
a lot like being fluent in a
written-only language”
–Emilia Phillips,
Embouchure
Sometimes, I’m afraid to say the things my body
knows, and paint my colorful, syrupy insides
on my surface. Most days I touch my hands to porous skin
and play over imperfection, running the pads of my fingers back
and forth like I would to smooth clay surface, trying to compose
myself perfect, to machine-made porcelain. No matter how
I press and scrape and roll my form is relentless, blotchy
and cratered, a terrain of inconsistent rounded ridges,
a persistent counterexample to capitalist ambition.
In an act of defiance my body exists. I’d like both
to have softness and respect. But, I concede, unable
to sublimate my soul, instead I unravel
scraps of skin in a futile effort to smooth.
I fail to pinch off doughy flesh between my fingers
like scissors, or squeeze straight my curved sides with palmed
pressure like I can with claybody. No potter’s wheel could shape myself
the way I choose to match an understanding that changes
day-to-day. A dissonance of this 3D life is that effort won’t reap
instantaneous result. And today, demolishing decades
of inlaid emotional eating proclivity is not in the cards–I’m still
expected to function. If I could add water to my exogenic,
unformed surface, use the friction between my palms to lay
myself out–a slab on the table–and match my self-image
to my outsides, I would. I would let this vessel be enough.
–
I don’t know what it means to have a body but
I know I’m tired of it.
Samantha J. Pomerantz (she/her) is a writer and an undergraduate student at Elon University. She is the poetry editor of her university literary and art journal and a reader for Yellow Arrow Publishing. Samantha writes out of necessity, to explore the identities of self, one’s relationship to the body, and the human condition. She has published work in Colonnades, WWPH, and Star 82 Review.