By: Divya Mehrish
The body is a vessel of ignominy—
words curl in my stomach like the roots
of baobabs. The body is like the bosom
of earth—a landscape of blood-red
summers and dented moons and carnivorous
flowers; a seasonal clock programmed
to blossom into April rainstorms and shed
its scales like a snake when autumn wind tickles
its throat; a seasonal clock programmed to hibernate
in the dead of winter. So, when my veins fade
below the surface of my skin and my fingertips
turn icy-blue and the world spins around my scalp
when I stand up too quickly as if my neck
itself were celestial enough to trace out its orbit,
I wonder if my body is simply going to sleep.
Perhaps I am a tree—destined to pine away
with the December wind just to be born again
alongside the darling buds of May. In this cycle
of rhythmic naptime, I have discovered that health
is as fleeting as a zephyr—I must catch it between
clenched teeth while I still can. I have discovered
illness is like rainfall—there is beauty in surrendering
to the sky and its tears and becoming one
with the earth, with the body. My rain is crystal
clear and gentle as moonshine yet saturated
with the desperate need to cling to me, to claim
what belongs in the tunnels of my capillaries. My rain—
her name is Anemia. But she has brought me closer
to myself, to my body, to this earth—this earth
that is like a wound we keep scratching, infiltrating,
hungry to know its limits. The way rain in eyes
become tears, become teardrops, become raindrops,
I keep falling and opening and reopening and leaking,
blood seeping out of my body through the shaft of my colon,
emptying out of the ewer of my inflamed intestines—
I am capable of flooding this earth with my very being.
But now I am here: standing in the rain with eyes wide
open, arms open to the sky, inhaling the deluge
and waiting for spring.