My massage therapist told me that it is entirely possible
I cannot touch my toes because I was diagnosed with
Generalized Anxiety Disorder at 8 years old.

As an adult, this means I suffer through Yoga Foundations.
Every time the class comes to rest in downward dog, I feel generations
of tightness ripping through my hamstrings.
I visualize sending my breath to the muscle as a prayer:
               Please. Release the bend from my knees. Find ease in this
sacred geometry like all the white women around me.

My knees, stubborn, stay bent.

It must have come up during one of our many muffled conversations—
she would laugh as I likely swore at her
with my face squished into the cradle, grimacing
while she became intimate with the stories
of pain held in my body. It’s safe to say we’ve
gotten to know each other pretty well since the car accident.

My massage therapist says she enjoys her sessions with me.
For our fifty allotted minutes she could put away her spa-voice
we could commiserate about the state of the world and share
with each other new ways we’ve found to build hope.
Tumbling through political theories and book
recommendations at 7am on a Wednesday

she could reconnect herself to the severed hands
that heal bodies day in and day out
stitching healer to body product to person healer to person
the act of embodiment is becoming a person and for fifty
minutes of her work day, Jamie and I become entangled
in more than just lavender oil and co-pays.

Sometimes, giving my body to Jamie would feel like self-harm.

When the migraines were especially bad, she would move to my sternum
telling me the knots in my neck just won’t let go,
like ivy creeping around the trunk of a White Oak the knots
latch onto my sides and with fingers like hot knives she
carves up my ribs because simply massaging the sore spot won’t
work anymore, we must move with it. Find a new way to adapt.

For fifty minutes of my day I must
reconnect my awareness to this gnarled being of flesh that
carries my consciousness of excel spreadsheets and song lyrics
and the names of all the native flowers in bloom in my yard
day in and day out stitching cerebral to corporeal spirit to
person the act of self-harm is becoming a person

Once, she explained:
when you are young and your body is still learning how to survive,
it can hold onto and inherit unusual stress,
Like an Oak contorting around fence posts your body goes grows around it
twisting around itself until it is somehow upright once more.

I suppose I do not need to search far for this inheritance.
Reflecting on my stubborn bent knees, I call on the memory
of my mother, the youngest of seven siblings and the only one who still tried
going to school in Basra while the city was being bombed.
She knew pushing through the fear was necessary for survival.

I have spent almost a decade in psychotherapy
trying to learn where my body feels things
and to notice those feelings more often than
fifty minutes a week. But, what I notice is how
easy it is to slip back into the cerebral — severed nerves gone numb.

It is amazing how, despite all of the things it had to grow around,
Jamie says, my body still found its way upright.
I try to share this sentiment with my muscles.
I am safe. I tell the knots. It’s okay. I coax.
But, stubborn, they remain. Protecting me
from an unknown, unseen primal fear

the likes of which bombed Basra.
Okay I say. Relax when you are ready.
But to relax is to stop moving, is to start to feel, is to
hurt, is to fear, is to fail at survival so, Jamie argues,
if capitalism doesn’t let us look into the body long enough to gain
awareness of what it holds, we will never find where the pain hides

Because the more you learn what is in there,
she says,
the easier it will be to let go.