Flensing
Body,
I want to be polite and remember the quaint concepts: modesty, womanhood, prayer. I know these old phylogenies of shame. You still feel them, something I refuse to acknowledge.
I think this split between us happened in a bed in Austin:
I slept naked for the first time. The rented Kirkland sheets, come undone, felt wrong. The man who violated me had already turned away; I watched the streetlight inch along his spine. Looking in the mirror a week later, I finally recognized what happened. By then, I only saw bare skin and openings that were no longer mine.
Each morning, I try to walk backwards through myself to mend the fracture. It’s like walking through a house in the dark, hands out, brushing up against familiar edges but unable to hold them. That night in Austin was the final break, but the faultline is much older.
This letter is impractical, but it is all I have.
—————
On the rare occasions I visited my extended family’s church, I stared at the ceiling instead of paying attention to the homily. The church had service in the round, an entirely circular nave with the altar at its center, curved rafters joined at the steeple. Suspended tube lights made a web over the congregation. The shape seemed less about uniting people under God’s roof than to allow worshippers to watch each other, to root out the smallest sin. I looked up, daring myself to transgress in fluorescence. The truth was that I needed somewhere to look where no one would stare back, or at least no one I believed was there.
You pulled away from me in these moments. Some might consider that holy. But I have no sacrament running through me. I was afraid to let anyone see my emptiness, veiled and unveiled at once. It’s fitting that you left me in this place, completely exposed, hundreds of congregants staring across the pews, a house of God packed with bodies, and me splitting somewhere between them.
I had felt vulnerable before, but in this church I felt threatened. When I lost hold of you there, I feared I wouldn’t ever get you back.
With numb fingers, I pressed my nails into my palm, a grounding habit. It helps me find your edges, to fill the empty space with a soft sting. It took me a decade to realize this is a kind of flagellation. The term itself has footing in both religious discipline and sexual gratification. One mortifies the flesh as a reminder of sin and penance for worldly indulgences. The other asserts sexual power and controls bodily pleasure. Mine bends me back to you.
—————
You hold memories better than I do. I don’t remember when I first discovered the strange patterns you keep. I told other girls in grade school they could write secret messages just below my shirt collar and I’d be playground courier, ferrying love notes on my neck. It wasn’t until puberty that I found the term dermatographia: a light scratch can lift my skin in a red ribbon, a hive in any shape that won’t fade for hours. Indented scales from desk chairs have always been my favorite; they gave a certain verisimilitude to mermaid games at recess and now spangle me with indents after shifts as a receptionist.
It was around middle school that I became obsessed with making marks on you, watching the swell and release of skin. It reminded me of sea anemones, unaware then that anemones only react this way when they sense danger.
In summers, I laid on the limestone ridge of my family’s pool for hours. You reached into the old shells and polyp calicles, made a checkerboard of my back. There were things for me to be afraid of—but I didn’t acknowledge them then. I didn’t carry the weight of humiliation for you yet. I was violent with you the way all children are. My bones broke easy. I was already compulsive, scratching bug bites until they bled. My mother kept my nails trimmed short. This didn’t last.
By age twelve, a fair portion of the skin on my legs was scar tissue. Grounding habits turned to excoriation. Each wound became hyperpigmented from repeated openings, deep brown and red and purple. Somewhere along the way, I decided I would remain covered all my life, sealed wrist to ankle. This vow made it easier to pick you apart. I would be the only one to see you.
After my first meningitis shot, the physician’s assistant had my mother leave the room. Alone, the PA lowered herself to run a finger over my bare legs. She pressed lightly, testing for soreness. Is everything alright at home? she asked.
I sank into you, untethered. I pinched my elbow like a caliper. Everything is fine, I said. She wrote quickly in my chart, left-handed so the ink smudged her glove.
More fingers wrapped around my calf. You can talk to me, sweetie, the PA said. I just want to make sure you’re safe. But I didn’t feel safe, not in that room with you exposed beneath my hospital gown, the too-thin fabric like cellophane just barely obscuring bruised fruit. The PA never hurt me, but I was terrified knowing she could see you.
Nurses still ask me about the scars at each yearly physical. One gynecologist handed me a domestic abuse pamphlet after removing the speculum for a pap smear. I waddled to my clothes, lubed thighs clenched at the knee, and dressed so quickly I missed two buttons, desperate to leave.
I didn’t skin pick for pleasure or because healing wounds looked wrong to me. I did it to feel more connected to you. To break through the numbness and remember my exact shape. Scars and shame were only byproducts.
—————
You memorized the wrought iron handle and kept it long after I let go. I looked at my palm, barely large enough to be considered full grown, and traced the impression the holy door left there. The red curl of it was almost bloody in the shadows as I stepped into the chapel. It was intensely quiet, only the buzz of electric lights and night wind on the roof. The heat of Rome’s summer left sweat on the windows. The man with me stepped forward, led me to the center of the tiled floor, just below The Creation of Adam, so I could look up and see the ceiling in its entirety. I had watched a print of it yellow above the mantle in my father’s house for fifteen years, those hands never quite touching in the husk of light.
Sometimes I think I can hear the paint cracking, the man said to me. His hair was purposefully disheveled, shirt slightly untucked, small tells of Italian preening. He and a few other guards offered tours of the Sistine Chapel at night. He was the only one out of uniform, willing to transgress more than the rest. There were other visitors on the tour, but we were alone in the chapel. He stood close enough that I could smell his cologne as we broke that divine quiet with our whispers. You stayed with me, maybe because this was a moment of body rather than soul, despite the environment. I ran my fingers over the door handle’s mark.
The man reached out, but you jerked away, walked us to the altar wall. I was too close to see the whole fresco, the muscled bodies bulging through pigment. I have never loved Michelangelo’s work, but something about standing beneath the altar made the top-heavy painting seem like it was seconds from falling over and crushing me, an appropriate design for The Last Judgment.
I noticed one body just off-center, the thin slip of someone. Not a body but a human skin. A burly man holds it in his left hand, dangling over a cloud. It took a moment to recognize him: Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, a saint flayed alive with the flensing knife in his other hand. The skin, though, is a self-portrait, Il Divino. Michelangelo’s flesh was not martyred, but he placed himself in the painting here, in that grizzled flap of body.
He hated himself, my guide said, suddenly next to me. Some say he wanted someone to kill him, to let the angels take whatever was left to heaven because he wouldn’t make it there on his own. I think you’d make it to heaven, though, he whispered.
You broke from me then, my eyes nailed to Michelangelo’s empty pelt as you backed away from the man, the threat of him. There are things inside me I wish I could remove with a flensing knife. But I don’t want to pull off my skin and have someone else hold it out like a fleece. That language isn’t right for me, made object instead of subject. I need something closer to Saint Agatha of Sicily, who had her breasts torn with pincers. Painters depict her holding a serving plate holding the parts men cut from her. She is the patron saint of the day I was born, and victims of sexual violation. Perhaps I was destined to be closer to her on both counts. But Agatha isn’t enough. I want to stitch us back together so my outline and yours are the same, no room for distinction.
Nothing happened there in the chapel, but it took another hour before you let me in again. The man assumed I was simply enamored with the art. You walked us outside to the Pigna, a bronze pinecone nearly four meters high. I think it’s the rain that brought me back to you, a cold touch in the humidity. The rain cut lines across the pinecone, a memory of water that once spouted from the tip.
I wanted to lift up a hand, to carry the whole weight of you in my arm. I knew everything would be right if only I could touch those ancient bracts, if I let you learn their shape.
I never touched them.
—————
Coming off oxycodone, I nearly bit through my lower lip testing to see if it was still there. I’ve never felt more distant from you. The pills were illegal on accident; the nurse at the minor emergencies clinic had slipped me a pack unprompted, told me not to tell the receptionist, and I had been in too much pain to question anything. After taking two, the world was the mason jar my brother collected fireflies in: a single hole for air, glass refracting the room in round shapes. I’d nearly severed three tendons in my ankle which weren’t healing properly, the grapefruit-sized ball of swelling now fibrous. You spent most of the time naked in the bathtub, pressing skin to cold porcelain while I watched from above, desperate to find my way back to you.
Everything became hypodermic: the radio antenna, my roommate’s cake tester, ice water in the faucet. Sleep thinned to a fine line I couldn’t quite thread. It was easier to ignore the static inside me when floating in water, shedding dirt and heartache. With two fingers, I spun a rotary dial around my navel, dragging a nail to see the subsequent welt even though I couldn’t feel it.
I was like this in Austin, high on whatever chemical cocktail you sent to keep me going. I realize that the reason you and I fully came apart that night was because I stopped listening to the implicit language of my body, too scared to hear the truth. Instead, I feed you a language I control: the marks I make instead of the ones made on me.
—————
An abandoned church somehow is more holy to me than a full one. Walking down the nave, the carpet gave and sprung back after each footstep, almost like water. All the windows wore thin metal grates, the stained glass behind them tinting everything blue.
The military built this church for the residents of St. Marie, the town surrounding an Air Force base in eastern Montana. I went there to photograph the hospital but ended up exploring the other buildings, too, holding my breath as dust moved through the air.
Someone had left an Armed Forces Hymnal open on the floor, the musical notation barely visible through paisley mold. I knelt and lifted the book to the pulpit, surprised that the last hymn for St. Marie’s congregation was Yig-Dahl, an expression of Israel’s faith in God. I imagine the men and women in uniform, singing the same words at the same time, somehow knowing the next note by instinct.
I have no faith, but I know now that language has power, the Word given to a body. I have a thousand memories like vapor, remembered the same way I set rosemary on fire and catch its smoke in a cocktail glass so the martini tastes like a French countryside burning, but I never actually consume the rosemary. It’s the language of the body that makes memories real, sensations that leave a physical impression. Not all of those memories are good, but I know I have to listen all the same, this ur-language that no flensing knife can cut out.
You and I are still separate pronouns, but ones in conversation. And that makes all the difference.
Gabriella Graceffo is a PhD student at the University of Montana pursuing an interdisciplinary degree in English and Psychology. This interdisciplinary work focuses on the representation of trauma in literature, specifically in the work of bisexual women, through a critical and creative project of research and lyric essays. Before her doctoral work, she received her MFA in Poetry and MA in Literature from the University of Montana. She works as Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest and is the recipient of the Robinson Goedicke Scholarship, Ridge Scholarship, Richter Fellowship, and Ann Early Award. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Poets & Writers, Rattle, Autofocus, Cordite, and others. You can find her curled up with her two cats in snowy Missoula, Montana.
