A Body's Universe of Big Bangs

Abstract

A Body's Universe of Big Bangs Leslie Contreras Schwartz (bio) A body must remind itselfto keep live, continually,throughout the day. Even at night while sleeping,proteins, either messenger, builder,or destroyer, keeps busy transforming itself or other substances.Scientists call these reactions—to change their innate structure,dictated by DNA—cellular frustration, a cotton-cloud nomenclature for crusade,combat, warfare, aid, unification,scaffold, or sustain. Even while the body sleeps, a jaw slackenedinto an open dream, inside is the dramaof the body's own substances meeting one another, stealing elements,being changed elementally,altered by a new story called chemical reaction.A building and demolishment,creating or undoing, the body can find movement,functioning organs, resists illness—or doesn't. Look inside every living being [End Page 124] and find this narrative of resistance,the live feed of being resisted.The infant clasping her fist or the 98-year-old releasinghers. This is how it should be,we think, a long story carried out to a soft conclusion. In reality,little deaths hover and nibble,little births opening mouthsand bodies the site of stories the tales given to us, and retold, retold,never altered, and the ones forgotten,changed, unremembered until this place is made of onlyourselves. Our own small dictators,peacemakers, architects, artists. A derelict cottage,a monumental churchstruck in gold, an artist's studio layered with paints and cut paper,knives and large canvas— the site the only placecontaining our best holy song: I will live. I will live. I will keep living. [End Page 125] Leslie Contreras Schwartz Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the fourth Houston Poet Laureate, serving from 2019-2021. A multigenre writer, her book Who Speaks for Us Here, will be released in spring 2020 (Skull + Wind Press). Her second book, Nightbloom & Cenote (St. Julian Press, 2018), was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. She is also the author of Fuego (St. Julian, 2016) and was a featured poet for the 2018 Houston Poetry Fest. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Collagist, [PANK], Iowa Review, Verse Daily, Catapult, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She is a graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and works for the peer-reviewed journal Tissue Engineering at Rice University. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press