Poem of the Week | January 01, 2024

This week’s Poem of the Week is “The Body Keeps Score but Man Am I Bad at Math” by Gabrielle Grace Hogan.

Gabrielle Grace Hogan (she/her) received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published by TriQuarterly, CutBank, Salt Hill, and others, and has been supported by the James A. Michener Fellowship and the Ragdale Foundation. In the past, she has served as Poetry Editor of Bat City Review, and as Co-Founder/Co-Editor of You Flower / You Feast, an anthology of work inspired by Harry Styles. She has published two chapbooks, Soft Obliteration (Ghost City Press 2020), and Love Me With the Fierce Horse Of Your Heart (Ursus Americanus Press 2023). Find more information on her website, gabriellegracehogan.com. She lives in Austin, Texas.

The Body Keeps Score but Man Am I Bad at Math

The mind, I want to say, is like magic. But it’s not like that,
it’s more like uncontrollable laughter, or being in the bathroom

at a party. Every party I dress entirely in black and hide in the bathroom,
afraid my hands will emerge like stars and laugh at all the wrong jokes.

I, I want to say, was a body walking out of the water,
but really, I was a body walking out of a body; it was mine, or

someone else’s, and I couldn’t tell you. I was just wet for some reason
forgotten to me. Nostalgia inflicts its presence on me. I dated someone

for a year and never learned their middle name. I slip past memory
as if it were a car on the sidewalk. I don’t miss Boston’s harsh cobblestone,

but I miss thinking I did. I don’t miss the streets I never walked in
Berkeley, because that’s not how memory operates, though I

could’ve been otherwise fooled. You told me not to forget, but I forgot;
it felt important, and now I can’t remember, which is the way of things

always. I’d love to walk my body home from a dark cold party
as if it were a woman I was vying to kiss. Desire is a pressure

leaving the body. That valve swings open on the goldest hinge.
Things that are true often feel antithetical to the truth, like:

a typical cloud weighs about one million pounds, or:
I have loved people other than you.

Author’s Note

The manuscript this poem comes from is overwhelmingly concerned with questions of desire and grief, and the way that memory distorts and elevates those emotions. This poem in particular has the speaker reflect on past loves, and how our memories’ interpretation of intense loss and grief can distort our realities. But if we believe in that distortion enough to organize our lives around it, does it then matter whether it is truth or not? “Things that are true often feel antithetical to the truth” is that idea: that what we have created as personal truth is hardly ever in line with the objective reality of the world, but it is inconsequential. The power of our grief, which itself is just diluted desire, is the most ritualistic animal that we must adhere to.