In Response to a Body

By Samaa Abdurraqib

I have never been the handy type – I feel like I should apologize for that.

I build things that are drafty, ramshackle, riddled with holes and gaps that threaten and undulate with strong winds.

I build spaces that are unfit.
Rickety places I would not ask you to stretch your skin over.

But. For you, I swear, I will learn.
I will cultivate skills.
I’ll spend all winter watching HGTV and having tea
with the old men who notched the beams back in their day. I’ll take a 6-week virtual class on interior design.
I’ll let Luther sing to me about houses that aren’t homes. All winter long.

Come spring, I’ll lay out my blueprint and I’ll begin.
I’d ask so little of you.
I’d gently push out your ribcage to make space for us. Convert your lungs into a doorway.
Your heart would be the hearth. It
would hold the fire,
would be the box from which the music emanates, would resonate with the rhythm that patterns our days.

Come summer, we’ll have grown the ivies to be trellised by your intestines.
We’ll have swept clean your pelvic floor – made the musculature smooth
for whatever pallets we place there.
In late August, I will pull up the garlic and hang it to dry on the curve of your stomach.

Come fall,
if your liver remains pliable, I will bend it into a curve,
to create a cavity and we’ll stack the logs there, behind it, close to the hearth.

By winter, we will settle.

If your body were a house
If this house were your body

We would make it a home In some kind of way.

Samaa Abdurraqib is the Associate Director at Maine Humanities Council. She is a host of the weekly poem program Poems From Here, which returned in 2022, and was begun in 2017 by former Maine State Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum. Samaa enjoys birding, hiking, and reading. You can find her chapbook at https://aclearing.org/shop