Take This Body

by Sherre Vernon

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How to explain to someone who never tracked splits
on an analog clock - 50 second intervals, and 25 -
that time moves in shapes, circles like gears spinning
over themselves, that you hold no numbers

in your head, calculate no math, just move body
to beats - so too, these ways of loving. You’re waiting
for the one-man, one-god narrative, as you’ve been
promised and told, all but chanting the Our Father under

your breath as you try to catch up with the Walgreens
paperback, high drama and too-good sex folded
into a paper house, and sacrament, sacrament,
holy-kiss. Instead, he remembers to buy the soap

you like, sometimes, and it doesn’t seem worth
the hassle to lay out how you lost all track of the chemicals
of him, took up communing with a menagerie of saints
each as unlikely as the next - somehow slid along

a Kinsey vector, each stop a little less like hoping.
How you gave up believing that romance or miracles
were meant for you, how they were too many
pauses and letters and not full enough of breath -

naming the many ways you split yourself, a bit
on the tongue of each one you touched, none of them
enough to make something holy out of calendars
or agreements. How all you want is to show up

and swim him without thinking, without
explanation or expectation, to move body by body
like gears over each other, in silent intervals
that just might pass for litany or prayer.

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This poem first appeared in FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art.

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Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the award-winning author of Green Ink Wings, The Name is Perilous, and Flame Nebula, Bright Nova. Sherre has been published in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review and The Chestnut Review, nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and anthologized in several collections including Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions. She teaches creative writing for the Downtown Writers Center at the YMCA of Central New York and composition at Merced College.

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