chair

By Beneth Goldschmidt-Sauer

CHAIR (French, flesh)

When I try to tell you how a body becomes ceded territory I could
start by telling you I can’t leave the car’s heater at 69 degrees.

Or it’s my mind.  The numbers between 72 to 74 are 
problematic also, that’s when men first noticed my breasts and told me

while I strode gleaming from the lake at dusk or sometimes even
under the fluorescent lights in the halls at school, that weird fizzy

 hum atop everything, male bodies below like blunt force
pushing towards history or math, elbows

sharp as the symbol for angle in my side
after the laughter.  Pity is a pretty flower with a weak stem though, every

girl can tell a version of this story, how her body tried to be a garden
but became a pulpy catalogue instead, not even glossy, that anyone

could get and paw through, licking their fingers to turn the pages.
The first time I had sex (’77) the boy

said it was like moving furniture.  He said it with a kind of
exasperation, like he’d expected an experience of grace and instead

got a storage unit he had to fill without pay. Later,
he put his hand on the back of my neck and pushed down hard

and when I realized what he wanted me to do I think my mid-century
self, simple, functional and with a muted grain

did what he wanted but retreated further
into my rococo mind, leaving the planks of my body behind.

---

BENETH GOLDSCHMIDT-SAUER is a retired English teacher who, after 36+ years in the classroom, received her MFA in fiction/poetry (a life-long dream). She lives in Vermont with her partner and child; her grown daughter lives in Brooklyn.

This poem originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 22. 

Photo by Annie Spratt