Writing from Life: Part II

"A woman’s body, my body, is an ocean, right?"The body remembers. Poetry is the long process of drawing memory out of the body. Or poetry is an incision, bleeding out the vital fluids. A rupture, an aperture, a hole in the fences of our lives that we can crawl through. A window, a lodge pole, a grave for what escapes us. Or a body, wrapped in stanzas and line breaks, rupturing into the blank page, disjointed and dismembered. Or whole, beating and shaking in the clear morning air.I’m obsessed with the “or”, the possibilities and contradictions. The cliché, the vulgar, the predictable. The erotic, the ethereal, the sudden. The unrefined, the wanting, the not good enough. The body is all of these things, as is the poet and the poem. Sometimes I think Canadian poetry forgets the body in its rush to the artifact, a colonial poetic, a Terra Nullius of the body.I think about the body when I write. Not “the body,” a depersonalized object open to interrogation, but my body. A trans girl body, a surgically altered body with scars, incision marks, and still healing tissues. Hips with estrogen patches on them, widening over the course of two years. Breasts with stretch marks, hands with IV scars from hospitalizations, cheekbones with memories of my gookum in their arcs, and lungs with constriction from a decade of smoking. Imperfect vessel, fragmented whole, falling into sleep or desire.I write poems about my body. Getting fucked or putting on makeup, cramping, or surgery. In poems, I start with my body and expand outward, tracing the bones into the air. From the body: comes affect, comes touch, comes other bodies. The ontology of a poem is a fleshy failure. There is something about a woman in the body of a poem that pushes back everything we’re forced to believe. A woman’s body, my body, is an ocean, right?

Be the body that remembers, the body that soothes, the body that’s consumed and disposed and eaten and visible.

I saw that line on Instagram and liked it. I’m not sure who wrote it, but poetry is porous. There’s a watershed beneath us. We’re merging into a collective we pretend is singular. Everyone I know on social media is either calling someone out, defending themselves from being called out, or taking screenshots to message friends. A tidal wave of moments collapsing together, assuming there’s a productive possibility inside these macroaggressions. An end goal, a singular subject who will defy scarcity culture and ascend into the primary.Or we’re oceans filled with plastic: nothing we write is new, and we’re churning together toward a flawed and holy mess. How do you call out a body? Or call it in? I only know how to mark the sacred, trace the skin and spine, give pleasure like a river in spring. Poetry is an offering. What does it mean if the offering is rejected? Or wrong?All week I’ve been writing about rape, intimate violence, and abuse because Junot Diaz wrote an essay about his childhood assaults. His body, women who’ve intersected his body, and trauma flutter across my social media feeds. I write an op ed about my ex partner and Diaz’s essay for a fashion magazine. Memories of my ex are sign posts in my body, flaring up into incandescent sparks, becoming articles and poems. It’s the body that pulls me through, my body, his body, repeating.It’s often women who write the body. Men use their bodies as a way out, but women use our bodies as a way in. The suffering woman’s body, the ruptured female form, is our cultural role. Perform tragedy and resistance, be smart but not too smart. Ask questions and get a 100 death threats laced with images of rape. Be the body that remembers, the body that soothes, the body that’s consumed and disposed and eaten and visible. Perform luminosity. Get brighter, get dulled by time and people’s indifference.The poetic body is a woman’s body. On Twitter, women write how men would write them. Our breasts as signifiers of male vulnerability, our bodies as homes that we never get to keep. I’m tired of being a body in poetic dismemberment. I write three essays about my body, edit two poems about my body, and tweet into nothingness. I’m pushing my body through exhaustion into joy. I make its everyday ache into a kind of beauty.

I’m making an argument for the body as a poem. For poetics that remembers the body. For poetry that’s about trauma and body and being female and being racialized and being small and nothing.

A boy messages me about his vulnerability and I don’t engage. I’m disappearing. My book is coming out in September and I’m already disappointed in the ways I don’t make brilliance sing. Or the ways I do. Or the poems of my body that reflect truth into a thousand fractured points of ice. I use the word clit at least twenty times in the book. There’s so much anal sex in the book that is just a metaphor for being in love with sacrifice. Bottom poetics.I’m writing toward liberation, right? My body is my vessel. I’m adrift in the night. A poem is a wayfinder and a witness. Poetics is praying in a midnight diner for mercy. Poetry is an act of dereliction. I hope someone reads this blog post and feels an impossible want. I’d like to press the world into my body and make them feel what it is to be this rupture. Quote Audre Lorde at the beginning of every mistake.I’m making an argument for the body as a poem. For poetics that remembers the body. For poetry that’s about trauma and body and being female and being racialized and being small and nothing. I’m making an argument against disposability and scarcity and fame. I’m pouring honey into my hands and resting them on your forearm, asking you to kiss me.I miss who we used to be. I miss who we could have been. I miss poetry in the rain and spring. I miss your body and my body. I write a poem. I pray for the possible. Everything is not good enough and that’s okay.