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.