wgst chapbook

CHURCH OF THE BODIED


ABBY WILLIAMSON


I. INTRODUCTORY RITES


INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMING TO TERMS WITH YOURSELF UNGENDERED/UNRAVELED
If you can’t love the thing itself, then love the perversion of it.
If you can’t learn the physical form, then learn the performance of it.
If you can’t rest easy inside your body, then
Remember, you can grip the rib in your fist like a pen or a scalpel — either one will create.
don’t rest at all.


Peripety (1)​, Jen Mazza (2008)
Peripety (5)
Peripety (3)


ALL GOOD STORIES START BEFORE THE FEVER BREAKS
Lying looks spectacular on the body,
until it doesn’t. My body knew how to be a girl,
until I didn’t. My mouth knew how to stay shut,
until I smashed my jaw on the bathroom floor, until
I tasted my syrup spit like an iron wine, until
I felt a finger slip inside my split chin forcing my head up off the wet tile. Me and my two sisters all have the same stitch scars for different reasons.
No one affords Adam the word birth. Does it not count as creation if you are cutting something out? Was he not also made a new creature? Boneless, breathless, bruised,
and I, like him, am so, so tired
of naming.
I kept trying to write myself as Eve, and couldn’t
understand why that metaphor never worked. I’ve always preferred absence over presence, and now I know that I breathe easier
with one less rib
than the full set.


The Incredulity of Saint Thomas ​(cropped), Gerrit Van Honthorst (1620)




II. LITURGY OF THE WORD


WE ALL MUST MAKE SACRIFICES / AFTER THE FLOOD
My body has never been a cathedral, but
I still have good altar blood. Abraham, lover — when I left the Ark, I looked for you first. Some centuries too soon, maybe, I’m no Noah, but I could be.
If I was the dove, I would’ve stayed gone sooner.
I am the dove, so I wear white blouses and
wish they would lie flat. Less
wedding gown, more ghost.
When the dirt dries, I fist my hands deep into high ground, wait for God or anyone else to pull my arms apart, pray for rain,
even still.
If we left this world watery, would the next generations make our bodies better?
If I break this twice,
will you bless me harder?
I write with red ink because it makes me feel like a teacher, and it makes me feel
like a sacrificial animal, and it makes me feel like a patriarch. I can hear God saying,
watch which mistakes you cross out.
I can hear the dirt saying,
‘adam, ‘adam, ‘adamah —
my port of entry, my point of no return.
Maybe I wanted
to stay in the water.
What I wouldn’t give to go back to when this wound was fresh, and do something different.
Dear God​ — when I die, I want to drown.


Contact,​ Mé (2019)


(ALMOND) MILK AND THE ACT OF INTENTIONAL CREATION
Do you think when God made the sun, he anticipated
our artificial replicas? Sunlight is a strange thing because we love it so much we let it burn. I want to know
if he hurt, when we found fire,
when we fused filaments into blinding stadium boxes. It’s not that it’s not good enough,
it’s that I need more.
Yes, your sun is a necessary, relentless creature, but some things must be done at night.
When I come home, I bathe in my mother’s bathtub because it sits under the cross-section of two second story windows with no blinds. Sometimes, sunlight still does it better.
In the afternoon, my body in the bath could be
nearly translucent. I watch the water light on the wall, like a host of heavenly angels spread out
across the ceiling, where I am shaped
like every one of them, and
none of them are shaped like me,
but if I drag my fingers across the surface of the water, we’re all good surgery candidates.
When it comes to the girl God made for me, it’s not that it’s not good,
it’s just that it’s not enough.
It’s just that after all these years, I can still only think about food, which is a
byproduct of being a girl, which is a byproduct of being a body.
Tell my why this word
never tastes right on my tongue, but she does.
I’ve never been a gardener, but
I have a good imagination.
In my synthetic Eden, I’m unmaking my own girlhood, unsweetened, artificial.


This time, the tree of knowledge
hangs heavy with grapefruit, and
I’m knocking back black coffee and bitter vodka. When we travel to the land of almond
milk and honey, the path is paved with
cubic zirconia. The trick here is to
learn the truth, biting and beautiful, and
then remake it.
The Wait,​ Darian Mederos (2019)




III. LITURGY OF THE EUCHARIST


HERESY AND ORTHODOXY AS ETERNAL FRATERNAL TWINS
I.
Here’s the truth about lies:
honesty and sincerity are not the same thing.
The last time I went to church, I spent half the service
watching a handful of red light trip across the tabernacle like it was dancing.
I don’t need to tell you all the ways in which I wanted this to be a story about wine, about someone’s red jewelry in the morning glare, about a confirmation dress, a bad brassy hair dye, a papercut on the finger of an altar boy, red embroidery thread on white robes, about how I’d been praying for a sign and I finally got a good one.
I do need to tell you how when I finally turned around to look back there was an ambulance in the parking lot, dead silent, spinning glowing red against glass against gold.
Here’s the hard part, I know someone got hurt but I’m taking my sign with me anyway.
Here’s the true part: the shit you say through your teeth will tell you more about what you want than anything spoken with integrity.
II.
Some mornings, I dress myself as if from the outside, like a mother, like a child. My mirror has too much to catalog — wet hair, strange shapes, sharp elbows, bruises from a friend, a lover, my own hands pressing down into my skin, all those words I learned back when I was emaciated — petechiae, stigmata, valium, viscosity, apostasy.
I don’t have to look in the mirror to hear that when I yawn,
my jaw still clicks on the side like a snake.
III.
This time, I’m kneeling in church and leaning back on the tops of my thighs and the edge of the seat like a smug teenager trying hard to say ​look, see me for the sinner that I am.
This time, the tabernacle shines plainly, and all I’m thinking about is how tiresome it is to be the only person in this whole damn room actually invested in transubstantiation. For some of us, “resurrection” is more than a Sunday morning theater show. Tell me who else here hates their body enough to do something about it.
IV.
Yeah sure, this is the part where I’m finally angry. That was the part where I realized that
this god is intimate and impersonal — my body is mine and it doesn’t care.
Here’s the exhausting trick of the light exposed in the liturgy:
devotion is the first demand of the physical being. Eating, sleeping, breathing — and its inverse. This is where denial becomes divine.


V.
Here’s the lie about truths: God wants you to be honest.
Well this God has made me a liar,
and I’ll be damned if I don’t feel perfectly created in his image.
Here’s the easy part: I never know if I’m doing
devotion or denial because I can’t tell the difference
and I don’t really want to. Everything I’ve ever learned about myself started off as a lie, but I’ve made my stories sincere.
Here’s the hard part: Now I know how to say
Yes — I am, I am, I am a girl, I am a body, I am a god,
with a straight face,
and I can’t tell you if it’s true or not.
​Death of a Cyborg, S​ horra (2013)




IV. COMMUNION


ON BEING YOUR OWN GOD WHEN IT REALLY COMES DOWN TO IT
Here we are, back in the garden, but this time it’s different, this time it’s
a darkroom, full to the brim with burnt orange light, like the inside of a wound, where
the whirring of the machines tells me that we’re adjacent to the throat, or pressed against the lungs, or somewhere else in the body full of breath. I left the water running in the sink in the other room and I can hear it hitting the floor.
Let me say this first — there are more ways to ask a question than maybe there should be.
It is possible to stay in the water without asking for a flood. But there’s a difference between being the thing itself and being the thing inside of it. I’m tired of trying to find the middle.
Here I am, back flat on the ground, wrenching my own rib from my side. The best kind of scars are the ones you make on your own terms. I don’t want to be asleep for this one, I want you to look me in the eye.
Yes, I know, I’ve been writing you all these stories about where and when and why I am not in control. But I’ll tell them back to you with perfect clarity, and this time, I’ll put myself in charge.
Here is the image in reverse: I’m on my stomach on the floor in my childhood home, and
it’s March and it’s raining. And the sky is empty because this is a sun storm, but it’s 7
in the evening so the light is orange and dying and warm. I’m on my stomach so I can hear my heartbeat against the carpet, and my face is pressed to the side so I can watch the light move like my lungs turned inside out. Now I know which part of the wound I’m living in.
Yes, I am my body, and yes, I am more than that. Yes, my body is more than that too. Trace the circle on the page with your fingertip.
This is the same story but better: I am on my back on the ground with my own rib in my fist and I am kneeling above myself sewing my own stitches and I am lying next to myself in a slightly different shape and I am bleeding blue in the open air because I want to, because I said so. This is the part where I remember — I am the thing itself and I am also the thing inside, and they are not as separate as I once thought.
I’m back in the garden, and the room of orange light, and the lungs turned inside out. The spaces are all the same and the sound ricochets around the lining of my stomach. Here’s the secret for skipping to the end — when I say ​creator God,​ I never meant maker of the world, I meant that being which has given me the means to create. When I tell you this story has only ever had one god and one body and one being and they are all the thing itself and they are all the thing inside,


I mean that I have never been anything but gutted and gloried and golden, I mean that I know how to be the wound and the rib and the surgeon all at once, I mean that I am true in the way that everything is true, and I am false in the way that I want to be. Here’s my favorite part of the story: nothing about you will ever be real until you can look down at your own hands and see the divine dirt under your nails.
Notre Dame shortly before roof collapse, Le Figaro (2019)




V. CONCLUDING RITES


INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMING BACK TO YOUR BODY REASSEMBLED/RECONSTITUTED
If you can rip out your own sutures, then you can remember you are the one who sewed them in. If you can feel the knife stuck in your side, then you can take your hand off the hilt.
If you can bite your cheek until you feel blood and taste fruit on your tongue, then you can spit red into your own palm, push into the dirt, and pull out a
new creature. The garden will only remember you fondly if you make use of it.


Peripety (7),​ Jen Mazza (2008)
Peripety (2)
Peripety (6)


ARTWORK
In order of appearance: https://jenmazza.com/statement/projects/peripety https://www.gerrit-van-honthorst.org/The-Incredulity-Of-St-Thomas-C.-1620.html https://www.ignant.com/2019/03/05/this-installation-in-japan-mimics-the-tumultuous-nature-of-
ocean-waves/ https://www.condecontemporary.com/darian-mederos https://www.shorra.com/p771654065/h4E700222#h4e700222 https://ricochet.com/693036/an-indescribable-and-horrible-beauty/ https://piavalesca.tumblr.com/post/150414658513/sagrada-familia-gaudis-magnificent-over-the