Edges
I am mapping the edges of my body,
the places hair & nail meet fresh air
I cannot feel. I envy how you know
where the tips of your toes are,
how you do not walk into doorways
or invisible obstacles, how your blood
is not always trying to escape your skin.
I study anatomy, draw on my own thighs
to make sense of muscle & bone.
Everybody wants me to take up yoga
except yoga teachers, who can’t work out
why my head isn’t straight
on my neck, or why my hands can’t tell
where my wrists begin.
Others seem to have a spirit level
in their stomachs that keeps the world
upright; mine’s drunk. I have cried
in every safe space in which I’ve ever sat,
back desperate for a brick wall,
including my own living room
with Adriene paused mid-smile. The edges
of my body have met other people’s edges
& felt nothing at all. I have wondered
if I am too fat for dancing, or if my paleness
prompts the sun to try & see through me,
or whether thumb-sucking as a child
numbed my everything.
On the morning of my wedding
my nose poured blood but I didn’t feel it
for years.
Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell was awarded the Northern Writers’ Debut Award for Poetry and a place on the Out-Spoken Press Emerging Poets Development Scheme in 2022. Her pamphlet, 'Breaking (Out)' was published by Selcouth Station Press, and ‘Unknown’ by Stairwell Press. She has been widely published in journals including Fourteen Poems, New Welsh Review, Shearsman Magazine, Spelt Magazine, Strix, The Interpreter’s House, Tears in the Fence, Carmen Et Error, The Alchemy Spoon, And Other Poems, Ink Sweat and Tears and Impossible Archetype, has longlisted for the Leeds Poetry Prize and Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for the Ironbridge Festival Prize