EXHUME
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EMILY LAKE HANSEN

MY THERAPIST SAYS WHEN THERE'S TRAUMA, THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE


​but it stores good things too:

the mechanics of tying a shoelace,
the hipfold of triangle pose, the slow
building of an orgasm. 

I’ve forgotten the rhyme, but my fingers 
remember: over, under, pull it tight 
and through, how to make a bow
out of strings. 

Even when the brain freezes, 
the body knows to survive:
an infant instinctually swims
if dropped in water, we hold our 

breath at the smell of fire. 
The body’s smarter. Stubborn. 
It keeps a closet locked full 
of treasure: weeds and germs

we thought we plucked years ago
and scrubbed away with clorox. 
I’m surprised by what it remembers,
what it knows that I don’t.

At the Vegas club, it electrifies 
where I fold: at the scooping
of a back against back, the running 
of a hand through hair,

the softness of a skin
I’d never touched. It was ready
when I wasn’t. It holds on
where I let go.

AT THE PALOMINO CLUB

In the dark room, I want to ask for more - 
her skin soft as silk, I’ve melted 
uselessly into a puddle. I know
you see me, my water face electrified
and embarrassed. I am a good girl - 
or I was a good girl - and I’m acting 
out of sorts. 

How do I recover from this? I touch 
her arms, her hair, her waist. There 
is glitter in my brain like a snow 
globe being shaken and I’m afraid 
it will break. 

At home we’re swirling in it. We find 
traces of glitter in the carpet, specs 
on dinner plates, even pieces in our bed - 
we wake some mornings with translucent dots 
like freckles on our naked bodies. 
Let them stay, I say, let’s make 
a mess, sleep with the sheets falling off
for a while or for a while longer.
I wonder what love can survive -
I hope it’s everything - and I clutch you
and clutch you again in the morning dark.


MY THERAPIST ASSIGNS HOMEWORK

In the mirror, tasked to love myself -
no, I reprimand, she said fall 
in love - I play a game of eye spy 
with my flaws. I spy with my little eye 
a new parenthesis of wrinkles, 
a double chin, my father’s witchy 
nose, my glasses perched on triangular 
stone. I want to watch it all smooth 
over how the ocean turns shells 
to sand, see instead an airbrushed 
photo of anybody else. If I squint, 
I spy the tiny hairs above my lips, 
sharp like blades of grass, my pores 
divets in the yard where flowers 
should have grown instead. I spy 
with my little eye a ribbon 
of loose mascara, an earring 
missing its back, the beginnings 
of something concerning growing 
on my right ear. When I was eight,
my mother sat me in front 
of her bedroom mirror - a closet
covered in panels of glass -
and showed me each blackhead
on my nose and chin. She dug
at them between her fingernails,
pushing out accumulated scum 
from the pits. I spy with my little 
eye a hole where something else 
might go, a mouth ready for new 
words to tumble out, eyes looking 
all about for home. If this is it, 
I’d like to redecorate, declutter
a bit at the edges, throw 
some things in the trash.  I spy 
with my little eye something green,
rings around pupils, a golden
highlight to my cheeks, a smile -
just a smile - on the face 
of someone I might love
in a new life.

ABOUT EMILY LAKE HANSEN

Emily Lake Hansen is the author of Home and other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books, forthcoming 2020) and the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in Atticus Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Midway Journal, and SWWIM Every Day among others. She is a Phd student at Georgia State University and serves as the poetry editor for Minerva Rising Press.
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