Relief

by Jessica Goodfellow

What do you feel and where
in your body are you feeling it?
she asks me. This is new
to me, who’d always thought
feelings were found in
thoughts.

Last week she showed me a page
of identical body templates, rows
of traced humanoid shapes
like paper dolls or crime victims.
Instead of flat outdated outfits
or police-chalked outlines,
they had the blues, blacks, and oranges
of emotions.

Fear, she pointed at one paper
doll’s red and yellow chest,
activates the upper torso
but not the arms; also, a little bit
of red is in the hands and feet. 
I wiggled my toes. She did not
mention fear’s black gag
across the mouth.

Contempt, I saw on the chart,
was not only in the head but also
in the hands. I resisted an urge
to clap. These body maps
of emotions, she explained,
were independent of culture.
Maps, I thought! Those
I could read, in particular if
independent of culture.

Meditation, she said, is being
aware of the sensations
of the body. It’s the opposite
of thinking, she said. Your mind lies
to you, she said—my mind,
the most lived-in room of my house.

She is quiet now, waiting for
my response. I know I feel anxious,
but I’m not sure where I feel it.
Relief, I say hesitantly,
is for me a high-energy state.
Good, she says. And where
in your body do you feel it?
In the base of my throat? I wonder.
Is that the correct answer?

I sneak a peek at the chart, see
sadness’s blue torpor in the arms
and legs, its chest as black as
a human-shaped shooting target,
a splatter of hot red
bullet holes through the heart.
Shame, I see, has oversized
ovoid yellow eyes, staring blankly
from under a massive forehead,
like an alien.

She is waiting
for an answer. I am waiting
for a sensation stronger than
a thought. Waiting, my mind
thinks of Nepal, where some music-
al instruments can be made
only at the time of a solar eclipse.
Sometimes years pass between
eclipses, silent years of waiting
for an instrument to be finished.

::

Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Japan.

Image: “Scissorbird” by Sarah J. Sloat

Image description: a bird with a pair of small silver scissors for a head. The wings and tail are made of brightly colored thin strips of paper. The background is an empty postcard.