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Hi friends,
When I first started this Substack, I shared prose poems like the one below far more regularly, but moved away for some time as longer pieces stole my interest. I feel most vulnerable when I share poems, probably because my instinct with poetry is to attack the very marrow of various traumas. Even when I’m writing a deeply personal personal essay (ha) it feels easier, more instinctive, to write in circles around the thing. And though it didn’t always feel this way, it certainly does now.
But poetry gets at the very heart and soul of that thing in an entirely different way. Scratches an itch that needs to be scratched, so-to-speak. And so, here we are.
i. The body is an unmistakable instrument. We strive to change it, mold it, control it. We want to teach the old dog new tricks. We want to be able to shift without leaving a mark—no ripple or stress. There she is: entering the water in a red dress. We see her holding her bones like fists and weare told totongue our wounds, pocket the blood. I read somewhere that this clinging fatigue is what happens when the body leaves fight or flight mode. It falls into sleep like a trapdoor at the end of the world. Dreams giggle coyly there. To perform our trauma in any other way but this.I have been carrying it such a long way.To forget it wasn't always with us. The body tells itself what it needs to, you see. ii. Understand that I am grieving: a shadowy unlocking. A joyful leaving behind. And sometimes I really do miss the girl I was: tufted green hair, forever a spill of messy limbs and stilted platform boots. Special skills include poetry and pushing people away. The girl who stumbled along with yesterday's stardust in her hair, constellations hiding in the folds of last night's clothes. The one who cooed tough, "I was born in California, baby, did you think I was a stranger to the taste of ash behind my teeth?" before her voice broke. She often said the wrong thing— while writing down everything. This girl didn't know, exactly, what it was to sit with herself. When have I not gone running at everything in my life? she demanded. When have I not gone crash! bang! slam!ming into things at Hunter S. Thompson speeds? I lived on my nerve endings, deep in the well-worn vicissitudes of my extremes, and it was exhilarating and exhausting. Still is, sometimes, though I've gotten better at not leaning so hard into every groove. My peace is hard won. Trust me. It's a fucking tooth and nail thing. iii. I never wanted to use the word healing again, didn't want to repeat: sit with, or drop in, or make space. "Release what no longer serves us?" Well, yeah. I let the motherfucker burn more than once. So I've said them all, and I will again. More than once. But it had to come after the reaping— the long, cold, dark nights of the soul. Every time I was denied my anger or my hunger, by myself or others, a poison loosed within. Drip drip. Metronome tick. Now I've learned to dance with the flames, their white heat licking my face. I know the reparenting is working because sadness is no longer sovereign. That inner child, inner teen, inner twenty-something no longer thinks of herself as a hurricane or a black hole, a goddess of war— wife to Mars and Mars only. And she no longer wants to be left in the cavern of her secrets: protected from harm but alone, alone. I hold her hands, remind her there are worse things than a few wrinkles, more dimples round the hips and thighs. It's far worse to hold the trauma in the body with no hope of release, to transform the pain others have given you into shame, to carry the catastrophe of your Self all around convinced you'll never find calm. You will. Calm is every day now, the recognition that you get to be in your body still. Calm is the honey in your tea to assuage all the times you did not speak because you didn't feel you could. Calm is tying the joy to your rib cage, letting it bruise as much as anything else would. It's knowing (your Self) better, doing better now. Calm is remembering the clasp of dreams and allowing the universe to speak to you in them. Letting the answers that would come arrive, allowing them to wash over you. Calm is every day now, learning to stand in your peace as much as your power.
xx,
Kimia
Fuck this is so good 😍