Admissions Essay

By Traci Brimhall

Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s National Poetry Month project: Sing the Body: A Collection of Poems Praising Our Selves!

With support from Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) and Florida International University’s Center for Women and Gender Studies, we are publishing poems that celebrate body positivity and our selves.

In addition to publishing the poems as poems of the day, 10 select Sing the Body poems will be displayed on FIU’s main campus near mirrors and places where women encounter themselves. These poems will live in a dedicated portfolio on our website.

Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting SWWIM Every Day! Happy National Poetry Month!

            I am a good student. Voted most likely to try 
harder. Not voted most likely for fairytales, though I have 
been both hooded and wolfed. My honors thesis on the role 
of motherlessness and love hunger brought the candied 
house down.  
            I could’ve been valedictorian if the metric 
was ardor and potential for transformation. I recognize 
the chemical structure of oxytocin and how to calculate 
my best chance for a free drink from across the room, 
and both have strong angles. 
            I know how it feels when that hormone unlatches 
my ribs, silks my legs. I don’t confuse that with love 
because in each unit of intimacy, I enter slow.  Adjust 
my breath. Recognize the accusations that are 
confessions. 
            I excelled in the serious ethics of kissing, how 
it makes the body more image than idea, but I admit  
that sometimes I like to lick mezcal and grapefruit from 
a hero’s morally ambiguous mouth. I’m sorry. 
            That’s how I know I’m a successful candidate. 
The temptations. The failures. The ever afters of forgiveness 
I have already lived. For so long I offered others the love 
I wanted to receive, the cursive letters and lost slippers. 
The balanced equations and checkbooks. Years of service 
in the scales of care. Change my story. Accept me.

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Traci Brimhall is the author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. A 2013 NEA Fellow, she’s the Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

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