The Body Is No More Than a Greening Thing

By Louisa Muniz

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!

The body named self, named she, named soft,
            composed of stars & dust & longing,

longs for belonging, longs to know from where it’s come,
            forever chasing, forever racing to slake 

the burning in its bones. But isn’t it pretty? 
            Body husk of skin, pressed paper thin, 

deer limbed to guard the walls within, it’s too much 
            of this, never enough of that, forever walking

some kind of straight line, some kind of divine. 
            Oh, the muscle, node & nerve of it

the grand gland & gall of it, fighting its communion of lies, 
            it denies what it wants, defies what it needs, 
 
confesses on the caps of its knees in all its beauty & bleed.
            This body of tender lemon & light, this greening thing

of fleeting spring will one day be no more, no more
            than a fleeting sparrow of thing, a holy spirit of broken wing.

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Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox Journal, Palette Poetry, Menacing Hedge, Poetry Quarterly, PANK Magazine, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig 2019 Spring Contest for her poem, Stone Turned Sand. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, After Heavy Rains, by Finishing Line Press was released in December, 2020.

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