“I love to kiss/the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until/
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists/or turns to pain between us, they will still/
be there. Such permanence is terrifying./ So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.”
-Kim Addonizio, First Poem for You
For years I wrote on my arms. Sometimes I would take notes or write a schedule for the week in order to have it easily accessible.
More often though, I would write poetry, quotes, pieces of writing whose language I particularly liked. I would get writing stuck in my head like song lyrics and it would be a compulsion to write them, over and over again, just to have the pleasure of writing such lovely language, even if I wasn’t the one that originally conceived of it. Writing it on paper never gave me quite the same satisfaction though, as realizing it on my own skin. I would walk around the world with Whitman, Frost, Shakespeare, Stein, Dickinson, Fitzgerald, Eliot all divided from their wholes and out of context, wrapping black around my wrists, hands, or knees, arming me against the world.
The post-18 version of this, of course, is tattoos. Despite my eagerness to write everything on myself in pen, I have not yet ended up a body brimming with words. My first tattoo I planned for several months, the idea crystallizing in my mind a few days after I turned 18. A few years prior I had read Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale and had stumbled across a mock Latin phrase that meant “don’t let the bastards grind you down”. I carried that phrase with me for years. I liked how succinct it was, and the quiet strength that it summoned. It was one of those phrases that I would write everywhere. When I sat down to design my first tattoo, the phrase just made sense, it felt like something that belonged on my skin.
Lately, I’ve been keeping a Google doc of all of the beautiful pieces of writing that I encounter in the world. Most recent: “If Mavis showed up at a reading, drunk and inexplicably wet, and heckled me onstage, I would know how to handle that kind of love. I understand a love that argues with you in public and occasionally puts down your body and knocks on your door only at midnight. I have never been loved like this before, and I resist it, every day, because I do not deserve it” from Samantha Ivry’s We Are Never Meeting In Real Life. This document is reserved for phrases that it would be a tragedy to forget, the ones that call out to something in the world or something inside myself, and put a name to it that is so accurate that there would be no other ways to phrase it. If I forgot writing like this, it would be like forgetting the name of rocks, wind, water, forgetting my own name. I want to read them and read them again, because it feels like hearing for the first time the name of something I have known all my life and thinking yes, yes, that’s what it’s called.
Sarah Manguso came to my school last year for a Q&A and I raised my hand to ask her if she were to tattoo a piece of writing on her skin, what would it be? The point of the question wasn’t really to see what she would say, but rather to see if she had an answer, if this was something that she had to think about or if it was something that came off of her tongue easily, as if it had been hovering in her brain, laying heavy over it like a film. As if she felt the same compulsion I do, to commit to permanence every beautiful piece of writing to her skin. Her answer was immediate. There are of course clichés about artistic types having tattoos and it is certain that some of that has to do with the overlap between artistic and alternative cultures. However, I’d like to believe that there’s something else at work, some other reason that we feel the need to ingrain images and words into our bodies.
I recently attended a talk at Women and Children First in downtown Chicago on the topic of the body. Four writers and two moderators were gathered to talk about how the body plays a role in their writing. I immediately noticed that three of the people on the panel had visible tattoos. When the panel opened up for audience questions, I asked how they addressed bodies differently when it came to their bodies as writers, the bodies of their narrators, and the bodies of the other characters in their writing. Kiki Petrosino said that part of what was freeing in being a writer was that it was in some ways an escape from the body, and that writers create new bodies for themselves through their writing.
I believe that the relationship between bodies and words is one of internalization and external realization. When we write our own thoughts it’s because we contain something inside ourselves and we need that thing to manifest outside of ourselves. When we take the words of others and choose to keep them on our body it’s an act of internalization, we want the feeling summoned by those words to dissolve into ourselves, we want poetry to run through our blood and prose to ease our breathing.
We want to change the things that we contain, whether by consumption or extraction. In the end, we are believers, writing runes on our skin and incantations on paper, hoping to bring things to life.
