“Relearning the Body” by Carlene Gadapee

The sweet kiss of blade on skin –no, this is not a suicide poem— releases the winter in tidy swaths, spiky, unruly, itchy hair, left too long, like this season. It’s been a while since conventional upkeep ruled grooming. Winter is too cold, too dry, and my vision

too faded for shaving unless I must. Today felt right. Under foamy suds, I feel my way along knobby and knotted vein-paths, behind creaky knees and over wrinkled ankles, rediscovering the contours

of my hibernated self, reacquainting by careful touch long-healed scars and bruises. These legs have carried me a long way, and must for a while longer. Pale skin emerges under the running tap, strangely smooth, but not elegant. It can’t be, but this is ritual, this is spring.

Artist Statement

The poems I'm moving toward writing of late seem to be drawing me into a conversation about women's roles and what it means to be an aging woman in today's culture. The Maid-Mother-Crone dynamic seems to leave gaps to fill, and I'm hopeful that some of my work will do that well. This particular poem, "Relearning the Body," is both personal and universal (at least to the distaff side). Social norms like smooth hairlessness come up against practicality: why do we do it? And if not for our own comfort, then for whose? I think that those two questions drive a lot of what we do, what we don't want to do, and what we end up doing begrudgingly, as women. A good place to start is to claim and accept our bodies for ourselves. The rest may well fall into place, if we can do at least that much

Carlene M. Gadapee’s chapbook, What to Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2025), joins her poems and reviews in many journals including Allium, Smoky Quartz, Touchstone, Gyroscope Review, Vox Populi, and MicroLit. Carlene lives and works in northern New Hampshire, where she and her husband have a yard full of fruit trees and a busy beehive.