Rachelanne Williams
MY BODY IS A WILL
My body is the evidence in the case against ticking clocks, if only I could suppress the nerve endings long enough to shatter the glass and rip out the mechanical parts; moving steadily, I would write notes begging for them to tell the summertime children the storybook ending. Tell them I flew myself to Europe and I’m just wandering there. Tell them I’m finally content. Tell them I found a soldier to love me. Tell them I finally live in summertime; tell them it smells like their sticky hands where I am. Tell them the blood didn’t even have time to pool, so I didn’t have to see my reflection as the elevator began to fall off of its cables.
Tell them that my wrists were boarding passes that had to be put through the scanner twice.
Tell them in the present tense.
Ask them to pray for more atheists to prey on. My fingers are mp3 players that have malfunctioned.
If only we had records to skip.
My toes are the spikes holding down the railroad tracks, if only a train would go by. One day the rumbling earth will shake the massive nails from the kindergarten cubbies migrant workers have so carefully placed stakes in. I thought that if I grew up I would kill vampires, but no longer do I dream about nightmares. Tell them I enjoyed my reflection.
My cardiovascular organ gave rise to my Indian name; tell them I am Thin-Blood-Strong-Pulse.
My fleshy thighs are the zombie movie makeup that keeps me in line with the rest of the extras; somewhere I missed a memo that the makeup remover was substituted for humiliation. If only I could work off the extra pounds with words per minute, but the revolutions per minute would like me to remember that even in the first grade we had physical education. Don’t say I can’t jump rope.
My ears are the street gutters in a medieval town, thought to not exist by the historians of the future that don’t care enough to check. Unfed siblings hear the sloshes of shit and piss and dirty water as everything falls; scum will fall from the high windows and into my canals, into me. Occasionally a child eats a diamond, and it flows like the beat that drowns out all of the leftover Mexican food. Things fall apart. Tell them we stuck together; do not use too many adjectives, let them imagine their own perfection for me.
If only it would rain the sound of music.
My fists are the static on the radio.
My lips are the pictures drawn
with lines between stars.
My bitten and ripped
out cuticles are the pillaged
forests that are burning for use
of the land. My knees are the dog-
eared pages that show where we have
been reading. My breasts are cake mixes
that need only uncomfortable silences before
they can be baked. My lungs are the ransom letters.
My hair is the low ceilinged house that is being flooded;
there will be water lines and muck stains. My palms are the
thin tin cups that soldiers eat from. My scars are dots in the top
of the huge screen that the projectionist didn’t see. My left
collar bone is the coffee mug you drank from for years;
when it broke you just swept it up without remorse.
My dimples are the keyboard keys in a junkyard.
My stretch marks are barbed wire, holding me
until I bleed out. My eyelashes are the vast
shipping containers filled with our plastic
and sealed with the guilt that comes
straight from china. My irises are
unexploded ordnance that are
too dangerous for handling.
My shoulder blades are
the often doodled
wings; paper,
fly me far
away.
I will fly away to become fossil fuel for planes. Speak of me in the present tense. Remind them of the smell of summertime. Tell them I sleep through the night. Let them know that nothing is greater than single digit lifestyles. Tell them I could not even bear to remember my phone number. Remind them how hard it was for me to learn my home address, ever-changing. Tell them that I am still in the present tense. Tell them that people say “Jesus was ____.” “Hitler was____.” “The city was____.” “The soldiers were____.” “The women were____.” “The times were____.”
Tell them that I will never make the history books. Speak of me in the present tense.
If you speak of me at all.