You Would Love Me Without a Body - Regina Caggiano

For as long as I

can remember, my body

has never been a home.

For me, never, for others,

sometimes a place to stay

warm for a little while

pre-flight or post-haste,

a place to stay, sometimes,

a home, not at all.

It’s hard to stomach

how much I let it hurt

me, this skin bag of bones

that carries my soul

around in its dark little

interior. Still,

I turn my back on it most days

to contort what is flexible and

despise what cannot be changed.

You don’t know any of this.

You ask questions

about the way I touch myself

and linger in mirrors and I

escape you only by the skin of my teeth.

You must think that

I’m so vain and you’re right,

after all, self-loathing is its own

kind of conceit, I think

that’s David Foster Wallace

who said something

of that persuasion.

Anyway, stay safe in the promise

that I will never tell you these things,

any of them, about the way

my body melts like

a bulb of wax in the sun,

I could never have a hand

in my own demise like that.

But I know you don’t mind

that you will never have my eyes;

you have your own

and the rest of me too, the parts

that matter, the tangle of my arteries

the sparkle of my neurons

blue, and all my dark

interiors

so for now, I only wish

I could look upon myself

with you as my prism, to see

how you see

or better yet

to turn myself inside out

and meet you, heart first.

---

Regina Caggiano is a 20 year old emerging writer and Literary Arts student. She lives on the cold part of the East Coast where and has never meaningfully left New England Her work has appeared in Crash Test Magazine, 805 Lit + Art, and is forthcoming in Beyond Words Literary Magazine and Ember Chasm Review. More of her work can be found at regina-caggiano.wixsite.com/writing