Four Stories About My Body

Kaylee Jeong

COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards – 1st Place, Poetry

1. 

A little boy's pet fish died while he was at school. His mother, coming into his room and finding the thing floating belly-up in its bowl, promptly dumped it in the toilet, flushed, and drove to the pet store to buy a replacement. When he came back from school that day and ran to say hello to 

his beloved fish, and feed it, as he did every afternoon, he began to wail. His mother, hearing sobbing, rushed into his bedroom, knowing of course what it was about. It's the same fish, honey. It's not, the little boy bawling, it's not, it's not. Where did he go. Beating his fists against the floor. His mother saying nothing, all the while the replacement fish swimming in mindless circles around the bowl. 

2. 

The Eagle Creek Fire of 2017, started by a fifteen-year-old boy illegally setting off fireworks during a burn ban in the state of Oregon, burned approximately 50,000 acres of forest in the Columbia River Gorge. Thirty miles away, in the Portland metro area, people stared at the sky and did not know why their eyes watered, why their throats were suddenly, softly choked, why for the first time they could look directly at the sun and why it was a dusty red, like some alien desert planet, why everything they thought they'd known about the world was suddenly beautifully, terribly wrong. They found out hours later, of course, and went about their houses closing the windows and turning on their TVs to watch footage of first the fire, then everyone watching the fire, facing the glowing sky, the slow death of thousands of silent trees. 

3. 

There is a movie where a sixteen-year-old girl exists briefly to be kissed by Robert Pattinson. We do not see her go to jail as he runs into the bad-boy fast-car slow-motion night. The Safdie brothers killed that movie, says a man to his friend, they destroyed that shit, by which he means it was a good movie, they did a good job, he had a good time watching. 

4. 

After I was raped I laid in bed in my dirty clothes, pulled my sheets over my face and stared at the ceiling through the white gauze of my makeshift shroud, closed my eyes sometimes, did not dream. Did not speak. Did not eat for three days—I learned so much about the body, how if you ignore it for long enough it will forget how to ask for what it wants, then forget what it wants altogether. And I wanted nothing to do with desire anymore. Like a dead thing. When I finally got up I could barely stand. I knelt as though begging before the mirror on my door. In the moonlight as I breathed I saw the shadows of my ribs, rising to the surface of my skin: the absence in me announcing itself, greeting me for the first time. I bent over. I cried into the hardwood floor. But my body, cruelly, went to the kitchen. It ate. It drank. It kept on living. It did not care that I did not live in it anymore.

Writer’s Notebook

I've found the nature of trauma to be something that doesn't announce itself immediately in a single difficult but digestible event, but rather something that continuously pervades your life and manifests itself even in things that seem completely removed from your own experience. I did aim to capture that feeling. But writing this piece, I definitely didn't mean for it to simply be a bleak meditation on inescapable suffocation by trauma. I wrote this piece for a workshop, and when I asked my peers if they had taken away an exclusively desolate message, one of my classmates said that they read it more so as a piece about observation. This is the effect I hoped for. I wanted to expand and refract a traumatic event in order to (hopefully) create new frameworks for observing it and, through that observation, maybe find new ways out of it. And recognize, at the same time, how the act of observation can leave us feeling utterly helpless. Though it doesn't have to. 

Judge’s Notes

"This poem juxtaposes four angles of identity, of existing inside a body, after trauma and sexual assault. There is no central body here, but rather four of them, which further speaks to the disjointed absence the speaker feels. The speaker’s body isn’t looked at head-on, but rather, refracted by allegories of dead fishes, movie stars, and forest fires. The speaker’s body isn’t simply one of these stories—it is all of these stories all the time. This poem is a powerful rendering of the multiplicity of pain and the fractured selfhood from trauma." — William Fargason, 2023 Poetry Judge

"This poem demonstrates how, through the lens of sexual trauma, the violence surrounding us each day can no longer be ignored. The violence of casual lies, and of casual language, and of news that too often casually announces disaster and loss are pieces of this body’s story and of the larger story, our story, the speaker’s and mine and yours. It is a story that few are able to tell, but someone must, and I am grateful [this poet] has done so with such complexity, and such power." — Emily Pittinos, 2023 Poetry Judge

About the writer