In the Arms of Gravity by Veronica Wasson
Photo by Massimiliano Sarno via Unsplash
The girls were tall with impossibly long limbs.
Their lines were abstract grace, curves that moved through time, space, and rhythm. But their bodies were solid and real. Muscles and tendons. Sweat and pain. Lungs and breath.
Gravity snatched them from the air to hit the floorboards. The sinews of girlhood.
Chopin nocturnes played on a scratchy record. My mother’s voice sharply corrected the placement of an arm, a chin.
I could never be a dancer. I hadn’t the grace. But I wanted to pop up on one toe as they did, like birds. I wanted to be lifted. I wanted my hair long, pulled in a tight bun. I wanted to hurt. I wanted dark eyeshadow and darker mascara. I wanted satin ribbons wrapped around ankles.
The arch of a foot is like a bridge over a gorge, while the bones within hairline facture under the pressure of the body.
Later in the mosh pit in the vortex of bodies I would let myself be pushed and pulled like kelp on a wave, submerged in the sharp odor of cigarette smoke and testosterone. I was in love then and I liked to be held down because that physical force kept my mind attached then in that moment to my body.
I had my notebook in which I wrote poems. These poems were sinuous things, they seemed to go on and on. I seemed to grow them like night-flowering plants.
Back then it wouldn’t cease, like a series of pneumatic tubes, the “petits bleus” Proust mentions in Swann’s Way. I carried my Moncrieff / Kilmartin edition with the silver art deco cover on subway rides up and down Manhattan. I carried my blue notebook in which poems fell down the pages like sprays of nasturtiums.
The rattle of the subway chattered through me and regulated my voltages. All motion and vectors, it was a conducive place for poems, swaying on the plastic seat. The subway rattled through tunnels caught like crime scene photos in harsh electric light, past metal columns and falling tiles. It carried me toward your apartment and away from your apartment, like the tide.
The poems were interrupted, Proust was interrupted, a sudden irruption of my other life, confusing thoughts, so I’ll think of it this way: A teenage girl riding the subway in her combat boots and markered jeans, on her lap a blue notebook with a sparkly cover. She writes with a fountain pen as the car jounces side to side knocking like the dead knuckles of a ghost in a seance. She writes storm-cloud words that lightning over the page, jagged and electrical. She is riding home and remembering the smell of sex. She feels her youth as a tender pang like every pop song. The poems she writes trail in the water dropping their petals. They remind her that she exists. She is riding home from you and remembering that you held her, that you bruised her lips. In her best moments she doesn’t exist as a human girl, she is a bird, a stream, a sense of falling.
At least that’s how I remember it. But the difference between then and memory, I suppose, is that then I had to live through it, at the rate of one second per second. That’s the only way through it. The subway clanged and the brakes shrieked and the poems grew in spidery blue ink from my fountain pen, but your apartment was more complicated. Sitting cross-legged on your quilted comforter, I was never really whole, the femme part of myself yielded, or wanted to yield, while the angry part of myself forbade these meanings.
If you never saw me when you looked right at me, then what was I.
Tie me down so that I can reside within my body so that I won’t diffuse.
Spin — and spin again. Pas de bourrée.
Living inside this body is like wanting to escape and wanting to be pushed around.
The grand jeté —
leap toward nothing
but the waiting floor
and the arms of gravity.
Veronica Wasson (she/her) is a trans author living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Blood Tree Literature, Miracle Monocle, Genrepunk, the /tƐmz/ Review, smoke + mold, and elsewhere. You can find her writing at veronica-wasson.com.