This is How the Body Knows | Soon Jones
i was so tired and i ate like shit and i
stopped exercising and come Christmas 2019
my jeans fell off my ass with my belt
buckled on the last hole.
after abandoning a decade of
diets calorie math measuring tape
i had suddenly lost thirty pounds
in two months. i was
scared. i kept it secret, wore
the same baggy clothes,
hiding my shrinking self
from myself. if i never
said it out loud,
it wouldn’t
be real
this is how the body knows:
i shaved my head at the beginning
of the outbreak because it felt right
chicago had shut down around me
the cars were finally off the roads
and the streets were so
loud, everyone
speaking full volume on the sidewalk
truly seeing each other, seeing me
in all the stock photos and B Roll footage used
whenever the news discussed rising cases
man i’ve never been so represented
in media my entire life
every five o’clock story
another yellow grandmother
beaten, another young woman
pushed onto the tracks. nothing
brings out the asian in my mixed eyes more
than a paper mask.
i stopped taking the train.
i wore dark sunglasses
even on cloudy days,
inside grocery stores. i can’t relate
to my fellow far easters born here
who say they never knew
they were yellow until college
when i was born knowing how quick a slur is
to the roof of a white mouth
how fast their selfish, raging hands
to our flesh. this is how
the body knows:
(for twenty-seven years i have replayed
my mother fold into a casket
behind my eyelids, flat
chested, billowing black cloud of hair
now frayed threads
eyes sunken and purple
i can still feel her embalmed skin
like vinyl, like rubber, like your stomach
rushing up from your feet into your throat)
everyone says ‘cold dead hands’
but they’re only slightly below
room temperature
(and i say to her
they cut you and they stitched you up
with poison, ridiculed when you said
it was back. we wept together
in your guardrail bed
begging every god and angel
for you to live past thirty-five
and none of it worked)
This is how the body knows:
on the first New Year’s of the pandemic
while lying in bed,
I heard my mother’s ghost whisper
Isn’t it past time
you did a self-exam?
I found one lump.
The ultrasound identified three.
The biopsy confirmed.
Soon Jones is a Korean lesbian poet from the rural countryside of the American South, and writes for the same reason they breathe. Their work has been published in Westerly, beestung, Juke Joint, and Moon City Review, among others, and can be found at soonjones.com.