A Story About My Body
by Hezekiah
Allen Taylor
The young writer, working at a publishing company, had
watched it dwindle for a year, her ambition to publish. It was dull,
hard work, boring, but she thought she was in love with it. She loved
its potential, the way it could move her poetry out into the world.
It could lead to a life entirely about writing, an existence centered
around poetics-an effort to answer all those questions she'd always
had about herself, her inadequacies, and the place for her inadequacies
in that world she always spoke about. Then one night she came to a door.
It was a simple door, unadorned. She walked through it to discover sacrifices
on the other side, a pile of them, a mound: all those things which would
be required of her to become a 'real writer.' And she said, "I'm
sorry. I just don't think I can." And she shut the door and walked
back to her little cube at the publishing company. The next morning
she found a blue bowl with warm muffins awaiting her on her desk-a co-worker
had baked them for her. With the bowl was a note telling the young writer
how much she was loved, and she realized that her body was not dead.
And the muffins were warm and good.
***
The only serious piece in the lot, lovingly based on
"a story about the body" by Robert Hass, the full text of
which can be found at http://www.duke.edu/~rist/readings/hass1.html.
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