#MIDDLEBURY
You Are a Dark Body
Natalie Scenters-Zapico
of water with a bed of rock barely visible
from your surface. You are the only dark body
of water in a desert littered with bleeding cactus.
At your collarbones you carry a gulch, held up by a thread
of hair. You travel days drinking only from yourself,
because you are this land’s only dark body
of water. At the crease of horizon you find a woman
in bed, her chest wet with saliva, you kick her
off the bed, and take her place among its sheets. A man
lies down in bed next to you. He swallows your dark body
of water and gives you a woman’s body, a body you’ve
never known. As a woman he gives you sores, and through
the sores you breathe, and despite the sores you give birth
to a child stillborn for lack of water. You kick the child off
the bed, but it returns in the arms of the woman whose bed
you stole. You cry to be made again into a dark body
of water. The man kicks you off the bed, covers you
with dirt, and turns you desert. You cry for a bed he will never
let you sleep in again. You cry for your body’s bed
of rock turned desert for lack of water.
About this poem
“I grew up in the Chihuahuan Desert and have felt the kind of thirst only extreme dry heat can bring. In moments when I’ve longed for water most, I think of how my body is made of so much water and how the same earthly compound I yearn for could drown me. This poem is about thirst and how a life of thirst then quenched with a fistful of water can make you contend with all the women you could have been, the children you could have had and the ever-changing body you are given.” – Natalie Scenters-Zapico
About Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of “The Verging Cities” (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). She is the 2016-2017 poet-in-residence at Westminster College and lives in Salt Lake City.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
