What My Body Knows

What does the body know of itself?
It can’t explain its own physics.

We explain the body to itself.

Listen.

All things are inherited
by the cells except joy.

You will feel every old fear
in the trusses of your bones.
We call this memory.

Inside, you contain space
that does not equal its dimensions.
We call this love.

I have heard a child ask
if the world were ever terrible,
would people stop having children?

How to explain that the world has always been terrible,
that the most beautiful flowers are carnivorous at the root.

In your basement, there is a body
of water we used to know.
The thin film of algae covering the walls,
how it felt against our skin, naked in
the morning hours. The way our clothes felt
clutched to our wet chests.

How dangerous air becomes in the dark
when we’re somewhere we shouldn’t be.

How the fog rises in the middle of the night
to cover a valley’s secrets until morning,
when the whole world begins again.

Your body begins again. In three hundred years,
the hills will bow to meet the valleys.

We do not know what will happen next,
only that it will.

Savannah Skinner

Savannah Skinner was born and raised in the northernmost reaches of Appalachia. She is a poet, reader, and beginning violinist. She teaches English at a middle school in rural Western New York. She holds a BA in English and History, and an MSEd in Education. Some of her poems are forthcoming in Still: The Journal. Others have appeared in Gandy Dancer Literary Journal, and in various self-published projects.