Self-Portrait with Pelvic Wand

by Joshua Garcia
Finalist, Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Yanyi

i hook the wand inside myself   having found a quiet

                                                   time to gaze widely at my ceiling
                & loosen the sense that my body is closing

                                                            pick its little locks & breathe
into the place my physical therapist showed me                 do you feel  

                             that widening

                sometimes i laugh          at myself   at how i thought i would never
let anything in   thought i would never come          this far

                               this close to the edge   inside myself        a large

                 sound

sometimes i laugh because what should be so natural
                              seems to require magic   a few doctors   & some water-based lube

in the news   i read of another shooting   of a tired darkness
                               that feels familiar   not because it arrives

                                             like clockwork
                but because i have already held its shadow to myself

how the spirit will come for us   not by sending shooters

                              but by turning our bodies into a night with no safety
my physical therapist is the first person i feel safe with                    like this                 

she teaches me lullabies to massage into my pelvic floor 

                              to take the baton              & weave gesture into song

a skill i am learning like a language     perceive   decipher
                interpret

 

Joshua Garcia’s debut collection, Pentimento, is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press (March 2024). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.