TENDER IS THE BODY
Alise Versella
Intimacy is that look you receive when you undress each other for the first time
Say wonderment
How could a woman look so beautiful in this lamplight?
My body is a gift I did not know I had been handed until you touched me
The way lips and the fingertips
And the breath warm like a radiator is to winter in a Brooklyn sublet
Touch me
Intimacy is the way touch can make the body’s crevices known
Deep sea between the sunken parts of my hips, the spaces that parallel each rib
Chart these depths
Say bathymetry
Navigate the intimate parts of my brain:
That which sinks its nails into the meat
Says I know what you are made of, I am made the same
I wonder who has ever really known me
We reach for each other in dark corners
I yearn to explore dark corners and tendon
How it connects and is capable of withstanding tension
I watch our legs like loose strings tie themselves together
In the mirrored black of the TV screen
That the body can lie prone while these organs tremor
Like how gravity prevents the earth from spinning outwards
Say tether
Say intimacy is not just sex
It is the building of a nest
The way a hummingbird may build hers between thorns in a thicket
At rest her heart reaches 250 beats per minute
Could you imagine a heart like that, how it could love
How it could be a place you might call home
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO SELVES
Consider the distance between two points
The first is a height
The second the fear of the climb
And the distance extends out like a telescope
The farther a star moves away
It’s in this way
Wings betray a blue jay
But consider the altitudes a body can reach
Like a body asleep projects the soul to an astral plane
How a dream
Given branches, builds a nest
A home
And does not second-guess
Feathers
Left to compost
Heavy may be the bags of bitter salt
That break open like the earth
Or the heart
Heavy-handed it spreads
Like chaos
The load trusted more than the ability to bear it
The lover, considered foolish
How she lets her body burst forth
With brilliant understanding
Of what it means to love someone as much as she loves herself
Stop trying to calculate what can’t be measured
Like ocean fathoms
And familiar phantoms
Their hauntings mistaken for friendship
Trust again in the night sky
Do not mourn the fading of its stars as they burn
Scorching the arid dirt
You are the sapling reaching, but you are not the binding root
And your tears will not set the ground aflame
They extinguish the thirst
Of so many choking doves
Darling, the mountain is never the obstacle
It has always been your fear of the stumble
Do you think all fledging birds
Consider
Distance
Before they learn
Flight
No
They simply fly
I WILL EDIT MANUSCRIPTS, BUT I WILL NOT EDIT MYSELF
I do not wish for snapshots
I want the whole damn panorama
I want the extended cut
The unedited scroll
You let roll forth from the typewriter
Like a carpet you did not have pulled out from under you
And I want the dust you swept under that carpet
When your mother wasn’t looking
When you were tired of the nagging
After you unpacked all the boxes of your body you kept closed up
Taped shut
Because you have been so afraid to unpack your baggage
And buy furniture with sturdy legs
Legs that will dent the carpet
Legs that might scratch that hardwood if you don’t first lay down some velvet to buffer it
I say refuse all buffers
Like bowling without bumpers
Like I do not care if sometimes my ball lies in the gutter
Scream guttural if you cracked the mirror and today didn’t like the imperfect reflection
Scream if it makes you feel better
because hawks don’t consider the eardrums of earthworms
they scream because they’re flying high and hunting
They are taking all that opportunity has laid before them
Because God gave them claws
So do not retract yours
We have deemed declawing inhumane
So what if you scratch a little?
If you sting a little?
If the blood reminds the spineless
You are still here?
