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I envy your faith in the body,
in its ability to cope, heal, suffer the battles biology/ ecology/ man wage against it. A belly ache, a bitten tongue, a black eye. Alzheimer’s, cancer. GHB. God only gives you a cross heavy enough to bear, but He never considered how hard the straw is on the camel, what it’s survived. A woman’s body-- what you deem insurance against hurricanes, labor, viruses, and divorce even after watching Gloria Steinem interview a Congolese woman burned and raped by twenty men ten years ago. She lived you said, but what does her body house now but the banshees of youth, cataracts that see not things but through, planets of scars, a blood-pumping grenade, an ache so viscous and vicious, so wide, the Great Flood becomes a shower. In spite of every prayer I fake through, despite how much Gloria says otherwise, our body (more often than not) is a shantytown: a bloodstained skirt on the line, a lover’s dirty boots at the door, children chanting Victorian nursery rhymes, a steaming pot of rice on the stove, humming, humming.
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Marina CarreiraMarina Carreira is a Luso-American writer from Newark, NJ. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University. Marina is curator and co-host of "Brick City Speaks", a monthly reading series in Newark, NJ. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Writing Disorder, Naugatuck River Review, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora: An Anthology, The Fem, Paterson Literary Review, Rock and Sling, Bluestockings Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Pif Magazine, among others. |
