“Your Body Needs You” by Susie DeCoste
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Your Body Needs You” by Susie DeCoste part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.
Your Body Needs You
By Susie DeCoste
Walk it out like a cobbled path, a path with stones
missing and thorn bushes crowding inward, sometimes
far inward through the layers of the body.
You must ease back
into your body from up in the regions
of your mind where you lived
as if you didn’t have a body at all.
Your body needs you
to take it for a walk. It waits
at the door like a dog.
It used to be you’d go under
the knife, you’d purchase a decal for your car
“F— Cancer!” Some women in battle, meanwhile,
dressed in soft pink. Wrapped
themselves in pink robes and a pink cap
like a newborn. This may have been started by red
blood seeped into a white towel and thrown into the wash.
Now, you walk through thick bog
scrub, tangled, dense, stunted. Think
of what to pack in your bag, think of continual
solid breakfasts, think of new friends that sit beside you
at rest stops, share the view and feel for footings.
It used to be
you’d lose your hair, even eyebrows sometimes
singed from fireblowers in the fray.
But you remove your own hair before you start out.
You choose the way to travel.
You can’t tell when it’s over anymore. Nothing to win, no
mark of defeat. Walk in thick-soled shoes
until you see the clearing. When you see the clearing,
don’t stop. When you see the clearing,
keep going.
Copyright © Susie DeCoste
Susie DeCoste lives in Nova Scotia where she works in a school library. Her poems have been published in several journals including The Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, CV2, Grain, and Poetry Ireland Review. She won the Rita Joe Poetry Prize for emerging writers from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia in 2025.
Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members, curated and edited by Erin Vance.
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