Your Body, Still Your Body

Titled with a line by Danez Smith

It’s too good to last, this early sunshine in April,
this smell-of-cut-grass morning
and this body, with its mirage of infinite breaths,
its lie of immortality.
Your body knows its own edges
the hairs on your forearms
how they bristle in the cold
your skin, how it loves and loses itself
how it loves skin that isn’t yours.
Your body knows cumin from turmeric
it knows the splinter you remove with a needle
from the one that can get to your heart.
It knows the moment of constriction and stoppage.
Your body knows
breath, hearing, memory.
Your body knows sting and soothe
the graffiti of cuts on your fingers
the heat of a lover’s hand on your back.
Your body knows how to stand stock still
and sequoia-strong and knows
it will not stand forever.
Your body knows there will be a time to leave,
a litany of lasts: last chocolate martini,
last walk on the beach, last walk
in the neighborhood, last purple bearded iris
and blooming dogwood you see there,
last shell cupped
in the palm of the hand.
It knows how to savor lilac scent.
It knows this delight is temporary
as heart beats.
There is a finite number of them.
The body knows this even if
we get lost one night looking
at the halo around the moon
and forget.

Donna Prinzmetal is a poet, psychotherapist and teacher living in Portland, OR. Her work has been published in numerous small press publications including: The Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Cincinnati Review. Her first book, Snow White, When No One Was Looking, was published with CW press in 2014.

Judge Ingrid Wendt, Oregon writer and educator, has co-edited the groundbreaking anthology In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (Feminist Press, 1980) and the Oregon Poetry Anthology, From Here We Speak (OSU Press, 1993). She is author of five full-length volumes of poems, three of which received the Oregon Book Award, the Editions Prize, and the Yellowglen Award. Recent poems are published online in About Place, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Claw & Blossom, CALYX Journal, and Ascent and are forthcoming in POETRY, Cold Mountain Review, and Mom Egg. One of her first published poems appeared in Volume I, Issue 1, of CALYX Journal. www.ingridwendt.com.