Scar
Sometimes it’s
bigger than my
body, the body
that gave it
life, that is
its life—as if I’m
a frame for
it, as if it
continues beyond
my end, although no
one, not here,
can see where
it goes, how
far, & now
it finds
its way into
every possible
place I
imagine, even
the past, which believes
in my scar like
a prophecy, & like a god’s
work, I have no
memory of it breathing
into me &
abstracting me
to myth from which to
remake the world
into the rising
& falling
action of fiction—my body
as denouement. Sometimes I feel
it without waiting
for its hum on
the nerves, its shivering
arc from eye
to jawbone. How often
I want to
give it a voice so
it can tell
me what I want
it to say—that it knows
me like tomorrow
does. That a need lives
in lack’s because.
Copyright © 2015 by Emilia Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 10, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I initially drafted this poem on a poster board instead of standard-size paper and found that the format insisted that I write about things that seem much larger than they are, that expand beyond their physical limits, like the scar that extends between my eye and jawline on my right cheek. Strangers and friends alike have suggested that I give it a new origin narrative: I was in a knife/sword fight, I smashed my head through a glass window, etc. In that way, it seems to have a life—imagined or not—beyond my own.”
—Emilia Phillips