To Someone on the Internet who Wants to Know Why Academics Use the Word Body So Much

I refrain from saying:
            Because we use our bodies so little.
Because forty-three windows face me, not one of them
            the kind a breeze can penetrate.
Because I sat in classrooms for how many years
            & could not recite which had windows,
what colors the doors were.

I do remember that one:
            tenth floor overlooking the park. The man in front
                        kept the lights low.
He was an expert on camp. People said he feared light.
That fall the sirens came. Once
            he pressed his face to the shades & shouted
why don’t you go shoot someone

Because that was
            also happening, then, now. We laughed, went back
to the day’s docket: Totem and Taboo.
I remember the blue of that cover. You might
            remember that cover. So many books I remember only
                        by where I was when my body held them.

The crinkle of the plastic covers in the backseat.
Dicey’s Song: her back to the water. Someday Angeline: her toe in the water.
I crouched beneath the windows, scrambling
            with tights and laces, pulled on a leotard, fingernails
pressing at my wrists as I recited the mantras. tuck the pelvis,
lower the shoulders, front back front. The station-wagon
lurched & for once, everything was my ally: car, road & even the clock, stretching,
            holding me, holding the words, holding the thing I had yet to call my body.

Laura Tanenbaum has published poetry and short fiction in Trampoline, Anti-Heroin Chic, Catamaran, Rattle, Aji, Cleaver Magazine, and many other venues. She has also published essays and book reviews in the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.