Holly Pelesky: Seen, Loved Anyway

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

Seen, Loved Anyway

When my skin opened and air kept
collecting in my heart, my heart growing
bigger and bigger, suddenly
loving the world and everything
I saw in it—when even trash bags piled
on top of each other in an alley looked
like a poem—you were there.

You were there when my skin
hung unzipped, when I stood bare
in the street; you saw the real of me,
not the dressed up lie of me,
and somehow, you loved it.

You loved it before I did.

You stood there watching me and when
I turned we were seeing each other:
paying attention, observing,
being careful to notice. It felt
like you knew me before, that
old cliché, but that wasn’t it. This must be
what it’s like to be seen in
entirety and loved anyway.

For you, I want to be more than a body.
I want to stand unzipped, never
again thinking the inside of me
is an ugly lining. Believing, like you
do, that I’m the poem I see in the
spaces between heaped trash bags.

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Holly Pelesky is a lover of spreadsheets, giant sandwiches, and handwritten letters. Her essays have appeared in The Nasiona and Jellyfish Review among other places. Her poems are bound in Quiver: A Sexploration. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. She cobbles together gigs to pay off loans and eke by, refusing to give up this writing life. She lives in Omaha with her two sons.