Jennifer Popa: RE-MARK THE BODY • Cleaver Magazine

Jennifer Popa
RE-MARK THE BODY, BUT KNOW IT IS LITTLE MORE THAN KINDLING

When I wake, my moles are retreating across my drool-stained pillow, into my sheets and the afghan tangled around my ankles. Last week my ears began ticking, keeping time with the grandfather clock downstairs. I never knew my grandfather.

You see, my body has been slowly dissolving, retreating, conceding. But isn’t this how it happens? One benign symptom, then another, then you wake to your moles crawling across your sheets. I swipe my hooked hand like I’m dragging crumbs from a table and gather the moles in the empty glass from my nightstand. I place a book atop the glass to trap them.

The doctors say I am ill. Maybe illness floats around like pollen, in search of a body, the way stories search for busy hands to write them down. The who of it matters less than the ink, the paper, the listening ear, the body alert and ready at the desk.

Last night on TikTok, a stranger shared a video of her forearm. She said the freckles and moles on our right forearm tell us how many witches we are descended from. I tugged at the sleeve of my sweatshirt and counted.

Twenty-two witches.

I wonder if that is a lot. My body flecked with ancestry, a line of women ferrying each other into the next life. Only, I have no daughter, no child wanted or imagined, and no more time. Perhaps this is why the moles depart at dawn—their exodus just a prelude to an elegy. My great-great-great-lineage is giving up the ship. Summoned by sunshine, they want for skin that will not be lost to fire and dust. Who can blame them? But I want to keep these clusters of pigment—my grandmother called them beauty marks—I have so little left of myself anymore.

I go to the kitchen and rifle through the junk drawer, retrieve the Scotch tape. In my bedroom, I reclaim the moles from the glass, one at a time. I drag them with my fingernail and return them to my skin. I can’t remember just where they belong anymore, so I fashion my own constellations across calves, arms, chest. I remember the one on my toe. Perhaps this is the mother of the mother of the mother of my mother. And where will I make my home? On the wet eye’s edge. In the crack of a heel.

I pin them down one at a time with tape. I construct a draw-by-number where the hidden image is undefined, as intangible as a whispered hex, a forgettable woman. I pledge allegiance to this marked body, my home of thirty-nine years. And when the task is done, I lie down again, my skin taut with tape. I close my eyes and wait to burn.

Jennifer Popa earned her PhD in English at Texas Tech University and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She now works as an Assistant Professor in Erie, PA, and as the Special Folios Editor at Pleiades. Some of Jennifer Popa’s most recent writing can be found in The Florida Review, West Branch, Ninth Letter, and Sundog Lit. She can be found at www.jenniferpopa.com.