Sarah Herrington
They Told Me Not To Write A Body
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.
(Previously published in A Curious Moon).
Back to “Motherhood and the Body”
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. Her memoir, Breathing Lessons, will be published by Trio House in 2027.