Shower Apologies

I have bought every loofa, exfoliating glove, scrub brush, shave lotion, and hair removal cream,
but I can never scrub or shave some things off of me.
I cannot scrub the shame of my body, no matter how hard I push,
I cannot scrub off all the miles of looping skin and lumpy cellulite,
the gnarled twists of varicose veins,
the deep swells of bruises rising from unknown places like ravens,
I cannot shave off all of the hair,
it just keeps growing back and coming back like a daily reminder pinned to the world's bulletin board
of my tireless grotesquity in my raw and unadulterated form.
I cannot scrub the stench of sexual assault off of me,
or all the purple perfect fingerprint impressions you left on my skin.
I cannot scrub the feeling of you off of me
or shave away the shame that I wasn't strong enough to fight you off,
the helplessness, I cannot scrub the feeling of weakness,
of my body being powerless against yours,
my voice,
my protests, only eggshells to yours.
I am convinced that at my wedding altar,
my wedding vows are going to be,
"I'm sorry for my body."
And he will be angry about my apology for something he says doesn't need to be apologized for,
and I will say, "I'm sorry, I'm from the Midwest. Sorry, I'm a woman, and that's just how we were raised."
To say sorry when you assault us for not having the perfect body to assault.
Today, I buy another shower brush,
this one is to scrub all of the apologies off of me,
but I can't do that either.
So I say sorry, and I add it to my collection.

-anna sluder

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair to reach the clock high above me, so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with a pair of gardening scissors. But I hear a knock at the door and it is present standing in the way holding a fish, she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it, she tells me she knows that everything the birds say really matters to me that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release, in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed, but that I could not remember my first cold water, there was no recollection of my first bright moon. She tells me to hold the fish and decide what it means to me in terms of love, so that I will remember when I leave this room, and when I go to sleep, that I once loved something new, and small, and grey, and something that had scales and looked nothing like me, and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there, but that that di
Read more

Green

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,
Read more

The Only Future I See

I am afraid to make today my home, I am afraid to buy pillows in the comfort of this moment, so I try to imagine the future, I like to think that it is a road lined with flowers in the colors of my youth, but there are no flowers, I don’t even think that if there is a road, it is lined with commas. When I dare my mind to try to imagine the future, I only see myself, no bills, no house, no job, no person, no plan, just myself standing in a field of baby green ampersands, cutting my hair and then holding a small bird, and the bird doesn’t sing for me,  as I promised I would never ask it to, it just stays alive beside me. So most days we break apart plums with our fingers like stories, and we make each day, each plum our home, and we are perfect and we are whole in this interval of quiet, where the sun is the only one who gets to see. -anna sluder
Read more