Putting words where her body ought to be able to be

This is a write from last night’s workshop — we were responding to one of the following fragments:
– back she went to her own country
– it is the thing you do
– I put my body where my words are (Luisa Valenzuela)

—–
She wants to put her body where her words are, fully into the flavor of sex, stunned with the liquid of meaning and possibility, and the most hostile vulnerability ever. This is the skin I settle into, the girl behind the screen, the safely ensconced in pixels or pencils / and yes, writing is an embodying affair / it sloshes your stones with hopes / it asks your nerves to show up for the aching / but I can forget how to breathe today / and I would almost always rather write than fuck / because behind the skin of my page I can just be that free woman / the one with no safety dug and scabbed beneath her nails / the one whose triggers are taxidermied and mounted on the wall for all to see / to gnash teeth at / to chuckle over / but they are quiet behind glass when she is writing and cannot startle or snare anybody — not there. There, her triggers become works of art, almost admirable / almost

See, that one looks like her sister’s face cluttered over with fallen feathers, the plucked body of a girlchild / and / that one is a diorama of her high school, cardboard cutouts of her graduating class cluttering the forefront, the teenagers’ faces all stained a kind of rakish purple that meant they had eaten the fruit of tomorrow and lived / (Her face is stained only an off-shore eggshell white with what she had to swallow, and there is no tomorrow for her in that picture) / in this one, the boys are all backhanded, they each have a piece of her virginity poking out of their ragged back pockets, though the full flesh of it lives at her house, in her parents’ room / there’s its carapace, over in the far corner / there are diagrams — this one here, and that one — of the ceilings she shut her eyes to, and then studied and tried to find shapes in

All these pieces so containable when she writes, when she writes about sex, she can shut the door to this exhibition / leave it for the curator and night staff to tend to its reedy exhalations and stains of saliva / when she’s writing sex, she doesn’t feel them on her body / she puts words where her / body / ought to be able to be