My Body Doesn't Have a Clearly-Marked Exit
By Melissa Studdard
But I’ve tried several doors anyway. Once, my grandmother found me next to an empty bottle of pills and pumped me clean herself. Come morning, churches had popped up inside the problem. Self-harm, preacher said, was yanking my Christ-self from my body like a tooth. Grandmother’s face was a fragile piece of China. One more helping of sorrow, and she would crack beneath the weight. She taught me how patience didn’t weigh anything. Rubbed my back all night like I was still six, though I was sixteen and still afraid to fall asleep. Her two hands limped like wounded deer across a frozen field. Her two hands holding all of misery, or life, or hope, or religion. It was hard to tell.
Melissa Studdard’s most recent book is the poetry collection Dear Selection Committee. Her awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award, the Tom Howard Award, and more. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Lambda Literary, The Guardian, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. You can find her at melissastuddard.com.
9/12 / Poetry Reading in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), celebrating its 20th year, with visiting poet-in-residence Jordan Pérez + SWWIM’s own Alexandra Lytton Regalado / Conversation moderated by Letras Latinas’s Laura Villareal to immediately follow / The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:00 pm EST / Free
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Incredibly moving, brilliant poem. Thank you Melissa and SWWIM!
whoa ... masterful piece, Melissa. What a brilliant job you have done with this difficult material. Thanks for writing (and SWWIM: thanks for publishing).