By Sarah Herrington
Aquarius 𖤓 | Sagittarius ⏾ | Sagittarius ↑
This piece has been selected by our editors to be nominated for the 2027 Pushcart Prize.
At the writing workshop they told me not to write a body,
because a body’s been told before.
And if I’m not a mother, I’m a dead body.
And if I’m not a child, I left the ark.
And if I’m not Venus and tears and winged epiphanies
of consumerism,
I am just a clang of empty space,
Mercury, retrograded into infinity.
Not so much siege,
but, hologram.
This is (apparently) middle age.
I told them I lost some decade’s worth of poems in the depression.
What happened to my rebellion?
Was it sopped up with a given vocabulary, and time?
No one answered.
I mean, no one could.
Back home, I kept thinking how they told me not to write,
Body.
How so many things I once said about you
had already been muzzled off the page.
I’d been told of others’ bodies—
how when a woman hits middle age
no one even sees her walk down the street.
My friend overlooked in line at the pharmacy
in a bright yellow shirt—
a gold ghost!
What even is a body
but a long pattern of filament language, up the spine?
Scrying a star pattern even if now, twilighting, out of defiance?
I keep quitting spaces.
I leave the writing workshop behind.
I watch the constellation of your poem not ended, but changed.
I’m looking for our home, Body.
Even from the sky, gaining ground.
A place where your brightness connects lines
in the darkness
with your bursting muscles of flowers,
into this great mouth of dirt.
Sarah Herrington is a writer and teacher based in New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Oprah Daily, Off Assignment and other homes. She leads Mindful Writing Workshops.
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