NOTES ON THE BODY IN TURMOIL

Jennifer S. Cheng

(Sonora Review 64/65)

1.  A Body of Text (i)

Synonyms for text: body, content, context, extract, idea, material, paragraph, passage, stanza, story, verse, words. According to this, I can say that my text aches every Sunday morning as I wake to your sound, which I hear vaguely like a hollowed out fever in my head as I dress, and that the text of life is morsels, bread, watery sleep—and maybe grace, which is a synonym for love. I could also say that the text streaming out of your levitical mouth is slipping loosely over my head, not because I don’t understand what you are saying, but because I think it longs for text, which has to do with the text of the dampened earth, and the text that we are men and not angels, and by men I mean women.

2.  Sleep

When I crawl into bed, I dream of the Body like colorful balloons that rise and fall and move sideways out of sheer rootlessness. Without an anchor, toes might angle toward a sky of dying stars, sweat may reek of rotting fruit: a body that is lost might be standing in the dark in front of a large lake. Light could land in all sorts of directions and patterns, and the world would be none the wiser. 

3.  A Body of Text (ii)

De-contextualize: To forget that underneath such skin were tissued organs contracting, dilating, ligaments binding, fibers interlocking. To forego what is hidden from view, in favor of bedsheets held like a parachute above my body, incontestable, a code that is emptying. See the Language of Reflex, the Hollowed-Out Schematic, the Instructional Tool. For when we were children, we felt the weight of your body hovering over us. We sat in pews, legs crossed, and counted the seconds we could hold our breath underwater. We hovered in the shadow of the fern in the hall and waited for the voice of God to turn us into stone, into diamonds, into dust.

4.  Aches and Pains

When the two women come with the news that Lazarus has died, Jesus weeps. He is disturbed by the loss that besets this man, depriving him of the experience of life that we, who are still here, know so intimately. He weeps with the two women, feeling their ache and anguish. After this moment of grief, Jesus reconsiders and walks into the tomb, his cheeks still streaked. The stench of decay has already begun to reek from within the body of Lazarus, as he has already been dead for some number of days. The women watch, still crying and somewhat confused. Jesus hesitates, then calls out to his friend, “Get up and walk!”He has said this before. When the crippled man was lowered into a house where people were gathered, we heard him say these words. Get up and walk. A command, a plea, a shrug of the shoulder. What we also do not know is what the dead man felt upon entering back into reality. Was he angry at Jesus for tearing him away from the perfect eternal? Did his body ache, his muscles atrophied and his bones brittle? Or was it like waking up from a deep afternoon nap?