This Body

This body is collection of slow-moving, inevitable failings.

This body is a vessel wrestling to not come undone, to remain outside-in, to maintain order and function, to slow its fading entropy.

This body is a distended suitcase, weathered by tribulation, leathered by time, stickered over with faded signposts, a palimpsest of pain and exaltation.

This body is a zipper, and if its teeth are hands, then the hands are losing their grip, and if its hands are teeth, then the teeth have all fallen out.

This body is a long, dull ache like the hum of tires on road, the road a concrete ribbon unraveling to the horizon, slipping over the edge and dangling into the beyond.

This body is a searing, fiery ember, a blood-orange eye in a sky powdered smoky white.

This body is an irregular heartbeat singing out of time in the staccato voice of a fallen angel.

This body is the product of gravity, glacier-turned till along a rock-strewn valley floor.

This body is full of choking desert sand that demands tears as sacrifice, as penance.

This body tires of the full moon; it lurks in penumbra.

This body is a broken ghost.

This body is lined with salty serpentine rings that mark the reach of high tide.

This body is seawater flushing through pilings, first in, and then out. And in, and out. And in. And out. The wood pilings crack and crack. The creaking fibers wail and separate. Barnacles cling like calloused skin. Stretch marks tell of birth—not of life entering the world, but escaping the body one wave at a time.

This body is the story of every body.

This body is every story ever told.