Good Bad Flesh

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_12/Polach.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

1.

Sometimes I wish I had a part of my body that I could know about
that wasn’t on the outside. I don’t mean my mouth
or my vagina – something private,
like one of those cysts full of teeth
that the doctors don’t find until you have cancer
and your body is all bad science project anyway.

Carrying it around under your clothes,
unseen, self-seen,
you blaze into high relief,
a light consuming itself that casts no shadow –

I want to have a secret self again,
but I want not to more.



2.

My roommate uses silverware
to stir her breakfast on the stove.
I hate this.

“You know, that might scratch,”
I toss out, affecting nonchalance
while I listen to her scrape
her oatmeal into a bowl.

I’m not fooling anyone.
The pot isn’t even mine.
“What does it matter if it gets banged up?
It was only eight bucks.”

Okay but you have two options:
use the rubber spatula instead
and decades from now
your daughter will recite back to you
the name of every city you lived in
all the years you spent
looking for a home,
litany as well-washed
as the pot drip-drying on the counter,

or you can carve scratch after scratch
into a mass of scars
so that soon the cheap coating
will flake away,
exposing the pocked raw surface,
everything will stick and burn,
it’ll be ruined, you’ll throw it out –
two years, tops –

it’s not like skin,
it will never heal,
not the tiniest mark –

I’m sorry. It’s not my pot.
It doesn’t matter. I know.



3.

“I went to Ace today and got some stuff,”
I tell her later. “A new dustpan.
And a can opener that works.”

“I swear my fealty to you this day,” she says.
I rake my rice into fretful piles:
“And a new pack of razor blades.”

I keep my head down, let her pause
and look me over, assessing, newly kind:
“I’ll get you some disinfectant swabs.”

You have to understand:
Love is in the little things.

That’s why, when I eventually take up
my yellow utility knife again
I won’t be scared,
I’ll tear open a foil-wrapped swab
and wipe the new blade, wipe my upper thigh,
then slice –



4.

Let me put it this way:
I wake up in a locked room.
I have a little pixel sword.
I double-click everything.
Still locked! chimes the door.

No sweat, assholes,
I have a rich inner life.

But it rapidly becomes clear
that I can’t solve the puzzle
because there is no puzzle,
and there is no puzzle
because the door is all in my head

or in my skin
or slammed shut and barred inside my chest
and I can’t get out – there’s nothing
to get out of but still
every time I wheel around
the door clicks shut again
which fuck that seriously
do you know what a luxury it is
to settle like an animal in your head –



5.

I wish I didn’t want to tell you this,
that I could just be cool about it
and shut my mouth
or at least that I could have managed not to wince all day
after my creative writing instructor
regarded me gravely
over a red-lined draft
where I used the word flesh too much
to say “I must ask about your health” –

I did try to write a cool sidelong version
where I never gave the game away
and I certainly didn’t say flesh
but it just upset people.
Sidelong doesn’t cut it
because I can really get locked into a room
and the only way to get at the window
is to get up high, get some perspective
on my small torn self:

how silent it is,
shivering,

how it stands over me with a knife.



6.

Like I said,
love is in the little things,
that’s why afterwards

I’ll rub my thumb
over my jeans so the ache flares
deep in my thigh, stop between classes
and peel my pants down in a narrow stall

just to take a look. Why I’ll close my eyes
to feel the pang, already dull,
my body scuffed up a little
but healing itself,
twinging, alive –
hello, hello.



7.

I set an early draft in my kitchen, too –
no roommate though,
I sent her out of town to leave me alone
with my cutting board,
my clean-wiped counters,
a chicken carcass in its shrinkwrap.
I dwelt at length on the body,
posing it, flexing its joints
to find the best angle
to crunch through the shoulder, the hip;
I lingered on the slippery skin,
the negotiation of flesh off of bone.

But I didn’t look underneath
the glossy drama of analogy –
I cut away after all the butchery
and missed how patiently that bloody-minded girl
put the kitchen back to rights.
Everything tucked back
into the pantry or the fridge,
the scraps thrown out,
the dishes washed, the knives, the cutting board –
humming a wandering nonsense song –
the counters wiped down.
The floor swept clean again.



8.

If you looked at my skin and mapped out
every attention I’ve ever paid it
you’d see the seams running, raised a little
where all the layers of flesh and memory
were pinned together and resewn.

I touch them through my clothes.
I’m safe:
time holds me fast
and will not let me slip
unmarked to an unseeing future –
whatever happens to me belongs to me,
closer than speaking–

but still I can’t rest easy,
still I toss and turn,
fitful, misaligned,
only at ease when I’ve been split –

standing over my bedside
looking down, looking in
at the tangled creature
that watches me, helpless, because
her faith in wholeness is still unbroken –
brushing the sweaty hair from her face,
tugging the dark close, plaiting
a fretful lullaby – alone with myself
fast by my side until the day breaks in.