Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I have always wondered what it would be like not to think about the body. What must it be like to move through space and not think of your own pain, your own balance, your own ability to get from one point to another. I can’t really imagine being completely free of thinking about the body while moving in a body, but I’ve heard there are such people.

Meanwhile, I’m always feeling both trapped and curious in my body. Why this headache right now? Why this fast heart beat? Why this back pain? Why suddenly is my vertigo back when it’s been gone for so long?

Like many folks, I’ve been to wonderful doctors and mediocre doctors, some who are willing to investigate pain or unexplained symptoms and some who are not. Still, it feels like I’m constantly going through something, experiencing something in the body. It is not easy. Though I am lucky that I can walk and move and for the most part get around, there’s also a frustration sometimes with being in a body that doesn’t feel at ease most of the time.

Just two days ago my husband said, “It must be hard to have to think and worry so much about your body.” And at first I was defensive, but I realized he was sincere. And then it made me emotional. “It is hard. It is so hard sometimes.” Still, I mostly try not to talk about it much. Even when I write about it, it feels indulgent. Like most people, I try to be OK, look OK, feel OK. How am I? I’m right as rain.

In today’s poem we see a marvelous response to two men who are tired of hearing poems about the woman’s body. I love this poem for many reasons, but mainly because of its honesty and its brilliant defiance.

Response, Years Later, to Two Male Poets I Overheard Discussing How Sick They Were of Women’s Poems about the Body
by Meghan Dunn

I too am sick of the body.
I too am sick of being a body,
am sick of being sick about my body,
have made myself sick over how to care for
and clothe it, how to make it behave,
make it need less. Walking in the street,
I have wished it might dissolve
so that I might more clearly see where it ends
and where men’s opinions about it begin.
When I struggled to love it, I tried to feel
nothing instead, to see it as a casing
for what I knew to be beautiful and strong.
I am sick of feeling nothing instead of
beautiful and strong. Today, I watched
my yoga teacher become a scorpion
and I tried my best to become one too.
I have no idea what my body looked like
but I know my belly shook with the effort
and that sweat rolled down my back
in fat pearls and that when I emerged
into the damp city streets, I did not dissolve.

"Response, Years Later, to Two Male Poets I Overheard Discussing How Sick They Were of Women's Poems about the Body" by Meghan Dunn. Used by permission of the poet.