Julia Perch: I Try to Measure My Body
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
BMI
It doesn’t account for a lot of things,
Like muscle,
Or lack of it.
Or spine, how when you have it, you’re stiff
like an ironing board, straight and narrow,
pious and good, right and then righteous.
When you don’t have it, how you’re flexible
but in a loose way, bad and then worse,
the way people used to talk about women
before they understood what you’re not supposed to say.
I try to measure my body but I can’t do it because every day, it is something different.
Sometimes it’s an ocean, so vast that I can’t fit it anywhere.
Chairs are too small and I’m so tall that I see over crowds,
seas of blank faces and other bodies and names, probably.
Sometimes I fit inside a jewelry box and you have to pick me up with a pair of tweezers
if you want to find me.
What you call bloat or fat I call movement,
How I am in motion,
How my body keeps moving, and I can’t always keep up with it.
Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it’s bigger than
even the limits I thought I understood.
If you want to measure me,
take the distance between my body and where it is today and divide it by where it was yesterday.
Write it down somewhere, then lose it.
This poem originally appeared in our ebook The Queer Body.
Julia Perch is a queer femme writer, editor, and life-long Philadelphian. Her work has previously appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, bedfellows, Philadelphia Stories, Word Riot, Crab Fat Magazine, and others. You can probably find her reading under a tree or talking enthusiastically about lucid dreaming.
