The body tries
to repair itself—skin
warm to the touch
and tremulous
as an early summer morning
when, putting in tomatoes,
I turned from the garden
to the compost,
and found you
hiding, retching,
bent behind the house, casting out
blood black as soil.
The body seeks
to keep its damage sewn up,
suppressed, sobs
heard drifting now
from the downstairs bathroom—
a plea for reprieve,
a repeated apology,
the liquor bottles empty,
the self in parts.
How the mind
dies by bringing along
the body,
and the body, like a dog,
keeps returning, but now
the cells arrange
oddly. This is what
a scar is—a trauma
barely smoothed,
but still a troublesome thing,
your organs not like the fruit
that would come to us
in August,
but hobnailed, insoluble,
hardened again
and again,
repeating—the body trying to heal,
trying to repair—
Rachel Harkai earned an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. A finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series, she was runner-up in the 2016 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, was awarded a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and has received four Hopwood awards for both poetry and nonfiction. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Portland Review, and elsewhere. Harkai currently serves as the Volunteer Coordinator for Room Project, a space for women and non-binary writers in Detroit.