How to Write a Poem Without Woman or Body
Use the words girl or female. Write about fingertips
and elbows. But don’t forget this cage of muscle and
bone, the familiar and unfamiliar feel of eyes on legs,
eyes on breasts, eyes on ass. The ways in which you
can never relinquish your sex. If you were a man
you would smile with your head down to the pavement.
Catch every door for every person wanting to pass through.
Remember that your body (there it is) moves over
sidewalks with ease. But you are not a man, you are
a woman (and there she is). You did not design yourself
this way. Breasts and hips. You wish it were otherwise.
That your body (and again) was a flat straight line.
A neutral grace to your step. (A fantasy.) You don’t mean
to write poems about bodies (or women), you just
mean to write poems. You can write about trees—
the cypress on the cliffs (Was it Santa Cruz?), their jagged
wind-bent branches. Cottonwoods (in so many arroyos)
in New Mexico or the ones that lean over that park path
in Salt Lake. Or maybe return to the Sonoran Desert
(that you love so dearly). Cholla piling up to the sun,
prickly pear scattered across dirt. Stop collapsing in
(on yourself), finding ways to make metaphors about
kneecaps, about skin. What is it like to watch the world (melt)?
the body (of a woman) walking. Kicking through piles
of yellow gingko leaves in Indiana. Waiting for winter. (Waiting.)
…..
This poem is from the chapbook
Without Woman or Body by Allison Field Bell (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/without-woman-or-body-by-allison-field-bell/
Allison Field Bell is a multi-genre writer originally from northern California. She is a PhD candidate in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University.
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