The first time I thought about my body
I was a sticky thirteen.
My religion teacher was always telling us,
"Your body is a temple,"
which really just meant,
"Don't have ***,"
because
you know
Jesus Hate *****.

Ten years later, everyone says,
"LOVE YOUR BODY,"
and I can't stop checking myself out in every mirror I pass.

"Love your body," whispered like a prayer
& all I hear is,
"Your body is a temple.
Your body is a temple.
Your body is a ******* TEMPLE."

What a joke:
I never hated my body
until someone told me not to.

II.

"Your body is a temple."

My body is a wasteland.

My body is an empire, long-fought-over and oft-desecrated by a war I didn't start, fought with curling irons and tubes of lip gloss.

My body is a canvas upon which I have painted a thousand versions of myself - versions I'd hardly recognize now, versions I wish I could get back.

My body is evidence in the crime of my life that proves
definitely
I did not sit back.
I was not a passive observer.

My body is a vessel, which is to say
it is nothing / it is everything.

"Your body is a temple."

Don't tell me about my body.
I've seen my reflection.
It doesn't even tell half the story.

III.

At work, Bobby the Regular always sits at the bar
and greets me with, "You look gorgeous."
He looks me dead in the eye with such grave importance,
like the revelation might save my life,
or like he's the first man to ever wanna **** me.

I know he thinks he's doing me a favor,
but
I've never felt less confident
than when a strange man
tells me I'm beautiful.

IV.

The first time my daughter comes crying to me that she hates her body,
I will not tell her she is wrong.
Instead, I will look her in the eye and say,
"Your lungs fill up with air involuntarily
& your heart beats 80 times per minute
& when you fall off of your bike and skin your knee, you cry because it hurts
& your body is not a temple.
You don't have to worship at its altar."

I will tell her all the things I should have told myself.

Everything about this feels inevitable.
I scribble poems down like a madwoman,
and that's how I know this must be love.
Infatuation always gets stuck on my tongue,
and lust just buries me.

See, I've read accounts of women who died of literal broken hearts
and wondered why the sternum isn't the strongest bone in the body
and whether it is our hearts are truly made of elastic or glass --
but mine just beats out of time whenever you brush up against me.

It's the oldest story in the world.
It's the only story I know how to tell.

Part I: happy things

sunshine
the smell of freshly cut grass in Spring
running thought a sprinkler
passing notes in class
chocolate --
but also:
your mother signing you asleep
laying in a field and wishing on stars
children's laughter
the beating of my heart as I fall in love
                                                      with you.

Part II: things that hurt

paper slicing your skin
a wicked boy tugging at your hair
the crack of your foot as it twists
out of place
stepping on a leggo
falling off your bike --
but also:
your best friend leaving you
               (again and again)
the destruction of a home
your childhood finally falling away
that you can be happy while my heart crumples in
                                                                ­                        on
                                                                ­                           itself.

Part III:  sad things*

unrequited love
lost puppies
bare stages
abandoned theatres
the last cookie --
but also:
moving away
the last page of a really good book
funerals for people you never really knew
funerals for people you really did
watching you
        walk away

Beneath golden-pink stars, you once
grasped my fingers twixt yours
and murmured, "The universe is a lonely place."
I could not understand then
what you meant, your words blasphemy
to my eager years.
How could the universe be anything but
bursting, joyful, welcoming
while you exist? I wondered,
not bothering to add, with me after it
because, after all, it was implied:
Our lives hand in a weary balance,
dependent upon the other.
I cannot exist without you
and you, my glorified disaster,
cannot exist without me.
It is an irreversible truth -
written into the lining of the universe
like the fact of gravity.

With you gone, I thought my soul would
crack in two,
but I survive.
A wretched existence.

The sun you wake to
will never quite be the sun I see.
Your moon will be a
pale imitation of the one I glimpse
before shutting my eyes to this
restless world.
Stilling my restless heart.

Under my feet the earth still turns
but it no longer shares its secrets with me or anyone
in this crowded city:
it is too big, too busy, too filled
with people always moving, breathing
being.
It has everything, this city,
except for you.

Surrounded by the bustle of all this life,
I finally understand your eternal
loneliness.

We bury the dead en masse
in a ceremony that must suffice but never really offers any closure.

Around me, the widows and orphans and lovers weep,
weep freely, without abandon,
as if their tears posses some ancient power
to resurrect the fallen or at least
make themselves forget that they once existed among the living.

My mother shakes in her bones next to me.
Her pale, sick face as they toss my father's lifeless body into a ditch of thousands
will haunt me until I exhale my final breath.

I do not cry; no misplaced tears pass my eyelashes.
I learned the moment the light escaped your twinkling, gracious eyes
that my pronounced agony will never raise the dead.
Tears are not for the deceased but for the living,
those who must remain upon this earth to remember, to ache, to long, to rail against the cruelty of fate.
Tears, like the dead, belong to the living.

Without you, I belong to neither.

I used to think it wasn't fair, my love,
that I should go on living while you,
soulless, vanish deep into the covetous arms of Death.
I still think it's unfair,
but I no longer consider myself the lucky one.  

I breathe in slowly, filling my lungs, selfishly enjoying it.
My time is limited upon this rusty, dying earth, I know that all too well.
Each second that ticks by is a reminder of how rapidly my time

*disappears.

Age four, I crept
into my parents’ room,
terrified that a Creature of the Night
would ****** me away—
afterwards, nights of my youth
always spent in want of my mother’s embrace.

But when the dam broke
and the house collapsed
and the center did not hold,
I floundered, fifteen and useless,
and I realized:
humans are monsters, too.

Don’t believe them (the books the fairy tales the
romantic comedies) when they tell you,
“Love will find a way.”
They are liars, spinning words like
the Serpent to Eve.

Love does not always prevail.

Sometimes, you are twenty and stupid and
far too drunk
and when you wake up in the morning, he is gone.

Sometimes you think, “I’ll tell him tomorrow,”
and tomorrow never comes.

Sometimes, he is the groom and you are the girl at the back of the church he once dated in college and forgot about.
Sometimes, you are the bride and because this isn’t Hollywood,
no one stops the wedding.

Sometimes, you wait up until four o’clock in the morning
for his call.
Sometimes, it never comes.  

Sometimes, he dies.
Sometimes, you do.

Sometimes, you fight and yell and sob into the phone to your mother—
who married too young and never really knew how to care for you anyway—
but no matter how many dishes you throw,
you just can’t make it work.

Sometimes, he is a man when you marry him
and a monster by the time your daughter is born.

Sometimes, you drop your change in the supermarket, the mall, the
subway, and when your fingers brush as you both reach down to scoop up the scattered pennies and dimes, you feel that
electric shock.
You look into his deep graygreenbluebrown eyes and see
everything that will be: all the adventures not yet had, the promises not yet made—
and then, amidst all that unlived life, his wife (girlfriend, fiancé)
calls to him from twenty feet away
and those promises never get made at all.  

Sometimes, you like him and he likes the girl
with the long blonde hair and
prettier smile.

Sometimes, he likes you and you
honestly just don’t give a ****.

Sometimes, there is no Prince Charming on a great white steed coming to battle the dragon.
Sometimes, you have to save yourself.
Sometimes, survival is the only happy ending.  

Sometimes, your families are feuding and no matter how much you try,
you cannot reason with your father or mother or
whoever is keeping you apart.
Sometimes, after that, you both just die.

Sometimes, it’s all about the timing.
Sometimes, you go in one door and he goes out another,
And then you never meet.

Sometimes, you sob into your pillow and beg God to change his mind for you,
but no amount of wishing can bring him back.

Sometimes, you are separated—by culture, by Time, by
universes, by a fate that has decided to break your heart in
every way possible and then toss you out to sea just
one last time, just to see if you’ll survive.

Sometimes you never find that someone who makes your skin burn, who
drives you crazy or keeps you sane.

Sometimes, you are just lonely and then you die.

Love doesn’t always prevail.

But sometimes.

Just sometimes.

It does.

You do quite well at convincing them of your normality:
You smile, and hold your tongue,
towing the line between quirky
and downright bizarre.
You play their game
and let them believe what they must
to sleep at night.

But in the depths of your soul,
You feel the thrumming heartbeat
        Of the universe—
                Its howls of agony
               And its music flowing through
                                               your veins.
Your heart hammers in your chest
           to the call of the stars.

You will follow it to the end of all things.

You left.
I stood in the shower,
Scrubbing my body clean,
Trying to erase the scent of you.

If I could,
I would peel away this skin,
Push aside these bones,
And pick out the pieces of your soul
You tried to entwine with mine—
Wrap them in a package
And mail it to you
Some day you least expect.

You appear some nights in my dreams,
But the nightmares come
When the daylight shines brightest.