Body: My Enemy, My Friend

Many of the qualities we value most in poetry—concrete language, sensory imagery, evidence of a life in motion—are dependent on bodily existence. But if poetry depends on the body to ground it in the affect of the world, then the body must also depend on poetry to untangle and understand its experiences.

My relationship with my own body has been much more fatiguing than I would like it to be. I have, at times, made an antagonist of my body for the things it can’t help. I’ve felt too fat to be beautiful, too white to justify connecting to my culture, too mentally ill to reach my full potential. In these more despairing moments, it feels like a great effort to love my body in spite of my body, and I lose sight of the real enemy—the unfair and completely unhelpful system of oppression that uses fear to divide us based on the simple, undeniable facts of our bodies. I resent that these arbitrary rules interfere with the relationship between my body and me. My own poems flail in search of the cure for this shame I never asked for, and have acted as a meeting place between self and body where we can negotiate a kinder alliance.

I don’t believe that shame is inherent to the experience of having a body, and even though shame appears in many of the poems on this mixtape as a beast to be grappled with, the poems still exhibit a deep respect and appreciation for the body. I’m grateful for the ways they address the body apart from its ability to serve systems of oppression, instead paying homage to its role as a sacred site of ritual, a lifetime ledger of love given and received, a firm anchor to the soul and self. Reading and re-reading the poems makes me wonder how I could ever doubt the unconditional worth of my own body, its reservoir of wisdom, the steadfast “I’ve got your back” energy it wraps around me every day. 

In Amber Dawn’s “The Ringing Bell,” the speaker imagines a hand bell rung by the padre in her childhood church, personified and delivering a message to her four-year-old self: “you, child, will spend half a lifetime / wondering if you will ever claim your own body / and wondering if poetry can help you make this claim.” I, thanks to these poets, say yes.