Ways of Body

I was seven when my father slapped on the horse’s flank,

making it raise its front hooves, the world lurched as the taste

of fear formed a thin, metallic film on my tongue. I gripped

the leather reins so tight that I didn’t fall — I couldn’t fall.

At school, I saw the faint questioning in my teacher’s brow &

crossed performing arts off the list and wrote swimming instead.

I was meant to be the good one, the daughter all of them wanted:

a self formed in the public sun, a transcript of visible triumphs.

I wanted to forge a body that would earn quiet nods, to fit

the silhouette drawn in dust, to wear a body that knew how to

be fluent in the language of motion, perched high on the expanse

of the horse, to conquer the rhythm of hoofbeat, the chlorinated

sting of the lungs, the shock of the dive, the burning need for air.

But my only lane is the migration of words, the press of my pen,

to see its slow exhalation upon the shore of a blank page.

In the library carrel, I am the archivist of what remains

when the last echo of the final bell unspools —

this is the silence where my own voice begins,

where the true notes of a novel swell, deafening and glorious —

catching the last, luminous hum a poem leaves behind.

Still, my body, an engine of ache, churns through

the chlorine, the coach’s muffled cheers like a jarring song

playing from the radio in another room,

until it blooms —

A silent, rising bloom of a breath,

break the surface for itself.