A poetic piece on a body’s history
Spokane, 2025
I’m brushing my teeth and instead of my usual absent-minded pacing, I decide to sit down on the toilet and look down at the floor. Another day, distant from now I first noticed the deepest mahogany whirls demarcating the life of Northwestern trees felled for plank. Its lithe arches and fibrous hills, a history both private and corrective in each maple stained wave once made of sugar. The sugar moved languidly or in a rush, depending on the season and the rest of the tree’s kin. Did another tree suddenly suffer, and need this tree, this tree’s bones that I’m gazing at over a hundred years later – did it need this tree’s help?
Before me I can see the pooling of years and sacrifice. I think of my own branches scarred by acid rain and time.
Scars. A gnarled pinky. A single dot on my back, the left flank. Someday this mortal coil will shuffle away and the husk that will only be “above the dirt” a handful of hours before incineration or something else I think of between now and my hopefully timely end.
Till then I will catalog my marks.
Florida, 1988
This small flat nodule on my right knee reminds me of salamanders and Spanish moss tangled in sandy enclaves like my most wretched, most tender headed knots of hair. Learning to ride a bike was a community sport. Trailer park kids of all stripes — veterans to this experience, my dad, and a pink huffy bike named Sea Princess with a banana seat.
I did not understand the slippery eel of gravity and her punishments. Only a squeal and lack of steering control and a crash on crumbled concrete.
I can still feel the warm splashes of tears, and the Florida sun baking my fast pooling injury. Pick pick at the scab, until the pink and sensitive grid was found underneath.
Kansas, 2005
A pop fly. Robin’s egg blue spread like a blanket, and the warm rays of the sun like a hot breath trapped above us. Probably too old to be playing kickball. All the town’s workers are gelling in a city park. Spiky carpets of green grass cut the crisp cliZZaCK of someone opening a can of Hamm’s.
In today’s game I thought I was a hot shot. I leapt to prove myself, leapt to catch the pop-and-shock-color red kickball. Velocity plus density plus improper form meant an awkward crunchy impact on a single digit: my pinky. I could feel the break, then a sizzling quiet. Blank mind. The frisson of bone, tendon and heartbeat. Percussives in my brain. Cautiously wondering out loud with others – is it broken?.
Surgery and still…this dang pinky is crooked. I’ve seen it spook children and the innocent. I call it my witch finger.
Unlike my bike crash, this time, I did not cry.
Florida, 1987
New kid. Hooked-on-Phonics era of education. Gray, low-pile carpet stuffed with kid farts. First grade. I was still extraverted and bossy. Where that girl went I don’t know, though she comes out sometimes. Something something, bulls and horns.
Some Brad steals my pencil. As an older sister with an overdeveloped sense of justice I immediately attempted to snatch it back, only to have him stab me in the center of my right palm like some grade school stigmata. I cried out. Somehow I got in trouble. This was my first lesson that maybe little girls weren’t supposed to fight back.
The scar from that stabbing has since been eaten and digested by time’s gaping maw. The myth that every seven years your palm’s lines, its maps, dis-order and rearrange themselves could explain the scar’s disappearance.
Sometimes the body just moves on.
Spokane by way of Kansas, 1997/2025
Perhaps I hallucinated the mole. I had remembered a copy-paste, copy-paste of a delicate brown dot on each left flank, hugging the second to last rib on three of us girls.
They, blonde and crystalline blue-eyed and I – brown eyes almost black, hair the color of an unfound acorn. I had remembered the exclamation of hiked shirts and realizations. Half-sisters but still connected by a single star, our homing device.
Since then D has been sprinkled with moles. Some that scare her, then disappear. Crooked splashes across her back. My single star remains but hers, and S’s have sailed back home.
