poem in which i love dick by stacey teague

this month i’ve mostly been trying to find a way to make my heart beat slower, moving through train carriages, showing my skin, frowning at men in the street. yesterday i didn’t even feel defeated.

because the city takes things from you, though nothing that you will miss. your whole self, for instance. what it feels like to be crying on the upper level of a double decker bus at seven in the morning is sometimes a nice thing to think about.

imagine sitting opposite you on a train. imagine a beach with stones in the wintertime. now imagine having to live a whole life.

i think so much about my friends and how it seems like i can never help them enough. we can never do enough for anyone. i love so many things that i am tired of.

in ‘i love dick’ by chris kraus, she says, “i want to own everything that happens to me now”. to be in your own body, to be accountable, present. that came as a revelation. somewhere i read the words ‘the dreaded female inner life’, and i thought ‘yes’.

the body is not water and i regret ever saying so. the body has become metaphorical, only something to refer to in poems. but the body is real and underneath.

through the window i see a storm and the rain moves the way a body might, because the body moves in all kinds of ways and the rain moves all kinds of ways. i think of the wildness of the world and the calm that is in me.

this poem originally appears at poems in which.

stacey teague on tumblr.