Destiny O. Birdsong | failed avoidance of the body in a poem
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In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we take a look at the life and work of poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Destiny O. Birdsong.
\\u201cfailed avoidance of \\u2018the body\\u2019 in a poem\\u201d
your therapist wants to know where
in your body you most feel your anxiety.
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you tell her in the bones
behind your face. they have their own
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music, like ptolemy\\u2019s universe,
and chirp like shuriken
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dancing in the road. your therapist says
you hurt because there are things
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you\\u2019ve never been taught to do:
how to hold yourself in sleep.
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how to drive. how to live with men.
back when you were five\\u2014or maybe four\\u2014
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your father knelt before you for the last
time, close enough
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that you could smell him, a zephyr
of kool\\u2019s filter kings and leaving.
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he pushed the tricycle toward you, purple and white
streamers limp as hair on the handlebars.
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by the time you mounted the cranium-shaped
seat, he was gone.
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your new goal is to learn to breathe
through bones, to make flutes of them.
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although, in reality, you are much more supple:
a crooked fold of flesh that comes so quickly
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when called. you are the warm-bellied
animal on the shoulder,
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coated in sunscreen and your father\\u2019s curiosity:
white-haired possum with his green, green eyes.
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you\\u2019re now the oldest you may ever be.
you have never before been this afraid.
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there are no bodies bound to rush in the room
when your own becomes a bullet ringing the tiles.
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you know all about \\u201clove\\u2019s austere and lonely
offices\\u201d: checking your stools for blood.
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checking your breasts for lumps. checking your neck
for swelling nodes. checking the locks,
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the coffeepot, all the cracked
eyes blinking fire on the kitchen stove.
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your own weep against a pillowcase
you haven\\u2019t washed, stiff with the
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miasma of your hair. you stare
at pictures of the girlfriend grinning in sunlight.
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you feel bad for not being taken with yourself more,
but your body is all asymptotes and fractals.
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your own skin splinters in the dark
from your dense heat. the pieces
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come back together under a halo of prescriptions
steeping your head in yellow light. sometimes,
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while combing your hair, a sliver of cartilage
lodges in your finger pad. you lick
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the glittering blood and spit out the shard.
compared to your father, this is not unkind.
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somewhere between your skull and the skin
that swaddles it, all the songs you didn\\u2019t know
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you needed to learn from him appear
and vanish with the rhythm of your breathing.
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