I Shouldn’t Write About My Insides

because a bird lands on a wire outside my house when I am four and does
something to my interior, makes me feel something I have no name for

because I write fourteen poems when I am younger about scalpels and
slippery wet organs and ripping open my sternum for a man

because blood is sentimental, how it pumps

because the pronoun “I” does not refer to my kidneys or my larynx

because when another writer says to write about the interior, she is not
talking about enzymes in my gut, the little cyst in my jaw, hair follicles.
She is talking about what I do with these

because the bird lands on a wire above a field of golden wheat, a field of
golden sunflowers, a field of golden poppies, a field of golden corn, she
hovers her little body there and beats her wings twice, so she does not
topple into the great gold of it

because the body is a warm room with no windows

because the room can float, and I did not build this house and when I look
out the birds plant seeds into my chest, drop feathers into my mouth, pit
the walnut of my eye

because when I am a child, my body is an animal I have not tamed yet
because my body searches for a sill to rest upon
because the “I” picks up an object and cuts a window into the walls

because a tamed woman does not talk about heartburn, the small
intestines, the little cyst in my jaw

because the “I” is made up of stories that I cannot find under flesh

because I cannot count the little birds before they fly away

because I am lazy and it is difficult to connect my liver with the bird you
hit on your way home to me, but I still feel something

because a startle reflex is a body’s reaction to the unexpected, causing it to
jolt

because when I am in my body and I look out, there are so many birds that
must beat their little bodies into the glass and my body’s startle reflex gets
in the way of my sympathy

because the writer says birds and deer are cliché

because a body is made of these

because I beat my body against the glass when I was little and
angry and scared and small veins and capillaries under my skin break into dark blue
and purple bruises on my chin

because where are the birds now?

because I could not tame them, I could not make them mine

because my body is a domestic thing, how I live here, and serve it poorly,
and in my little house, there are no birds, but I beat my body against the
windows

because although my thyroid is swollen, my larynx opens and closes the
way it should, and sounds come out

because I only chirp when it’s expected

because when I am small and ill, I put my head on my mother’s lap and
her throat opens to sing an old song she knows about blackbirds

because I’ve had fevers less severe than a field of sunflowers

Tara Westmor is an anthropologist poet, from Dayton, Ohio. She received her MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University and is currently a PhD candidate of anthropology at the University of California-Riverside. She has work published and forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, The Sink Review, and elsewhere. She is working on co-curating an anthology of the intersections between ethnography and poetry called Anthro/Poetics.