Poem for Friday and Shopping Fun

Scar
By Emilia Phillips

Sometimes it’s
        bigger than my
              body, the body

that gave it
        life, that is
              its life—as if I’m

a frame for
       it, as if it
              continues beyond

my end, although no
        one, not here,
              can see where

it goes, how
        far, & now
              it finds

its way into
        every possible
              place I

imagine, even
        the past, which believes
              in my scar like

a prophecy, & like a god’s
        work, I have no
              memory of it breathing

into me &
        abstracting me
              to myth from which to

remake the world
        into the rising
              & falling

action of fiction—my body
        as denouement. Sometimes I feel
              it without waiting

for its hum on
        the nerves, its shivering
              arc from eye

to jawbone. How often
        I want to
              give it a voice so

it can tell
        me what I want
              it to say—that it knows

me like tomorrow
        does. That a need lives
              in lack’s because.

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Happy belated Cinco de Mayo! Which we celebrated with tacos for dinner. I had a very nice day mostly with my friend Alice, with whom I went to lunch at the Brooklyn Deli, then stopped at the mall, which I have only been to once since the pandemic began. There has been a lot of shift, but we went first to several that are still there -- Vera Bradley to see the new Star Wars patterns, window-shopping at Lilly Pulitzer, Hallmark, and Francesca's, perfume samplers at Sephora, and we went to the new LEGO store which is a place of absolute delight and I have seen the new Thor sets! 

 

Alice went home in the afternoon and and I took a walk in the beautiful cool weather, then we had the aforementioned tacos and no beer, but that's always fine with me. I had my fangirl chat in the evening, around which we watched the beginning of The Staircase, which I only wanted to watch because of Colin Firth and Toni Collette -- I'd had the impression this was more about how true crime is covered than about the actual crime, but so far it's all grim and graphic death so I'm not sure I want to watch the rest. Tomorrow is mammogram day, so I have to remember no deodorant!