—after Memory, the Heart, 1937 by Frida Kahlo
As I stand on the shore of celibacy in my fifties, only part of my body is present today; skin aches, reaches back in memory. I am that school-portrait-girl in the prairie-style sundress, framed and hanging in my mother’s hallway for years, unsmiling and dull-eyed, all dark circles and vulnerability. I remember shopping for that 10th birthday dress, my aunt clearly wasting time, extending our trip so the family could prepare my surprise party, and how I dreaded returning to her home but did not have the words to describe the body-trauma occurring there, the uncle whose hands commanded my flesh for years.
I am the teenage pizza-delivery girl, the flour-coated aprons and pepperoni stink of the kitchen that would never quite wash out. In our button-down cowboy shirts, we girls easily undressed in the incestuous nature of that place, cycling through co-worker boyfriends and meaningless encounters in walk-ins and the upstairs storage room, so desperately groping, so obviously wanting to be seen. My body rebelled as I kept its secret past within me: nightmares and fainting spells, aching joints and contraceptive allergies, all raging like a big raw heart outside the safety of its host.
To the first college class I ever taught, I wore slim black slacks with an ivory brocade vest, my hair long and curly, a leather messenger bag replacing my JanSport backpack. It didn’t take long for the familiar guy in the front row to express his hard-on under his basketball shorts. He had seen me naked in that last wild pool party before heading off to grad school. What are the odds that he would be there to pull my flesh back to his memory, reminding me, again, my body has never been truly my own.
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Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a professor of English at Ohio University Southern. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Her latest chapbook, The Blue Wife Poems, is from Kelsay Books (2022). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.