:: Searching for My Own Body ::
Which is to say that like a good theoretical objectified body, my identity was created not by me but by the various desires and beliefs of those around me.
– Daniel Borzutzky
My body is a small cave door
it’s a slick whale a jubilant
sea of tall grass that sways
& makes its way across countries
& lovers I love love-making
I don’t remember a time when
I wasn’t interested in touch
I have these breasts
& some would want to come
on hands & knees to worship them
call me flower or desert
Maybe I was only supposed to be
stone or a baby eel
long & layered a nun?
I don’t remember ever saying
yes just no
I am searching for my own body
not the one I was told is so
I want to be always open
like a canyon
Maybe I was only supposed to be
tree or temple
In some circles I am
just an open gate
a sinful bauble
Once someone said you are this
& I never questioned it
I am searching my own body
for God
or someone like her—
Copyright © 2018 by Yesenia Montilla. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was in a room full of women, discussing the #MeToo movement, and it was no surprise to me that we were all survivors. Later, the one man who had been in the space says to me, ‘I was shocked. That was a shock. Were you shocked?’ And I just said ‘no’ quietly, sitting with the heaviness of twenty women of different backgrounds, faiths, identities, upbringings, everything, having suffered a very similar fate at the hands of men. Much later, I came back to the Borzutzky quote and tried to unpack it against my own sense of self, my own love of body, of consensual touch, and maybe even tried to give some power back to these women. I think I was trying to figure out how I had not gotten to this poem sooner.”
—Yesenia Montilla
Yesenia Montilla
Yesenia Montilla is the author of The Pink Box (Aquarius Press, 2015). A 2014 Cantomundo Fellow, she lives in New York City.