In this week’s poem, Lonny Saleeby offers an exuberant paean to the vulnerable, wondrous human body. I love how tenderly this poem embraces a body’s full complexity of biology and identity, emotion and physicality, cells and spirit. I hear life-affirming, all-accepting echoes of Whitman in Saleeby’s poem, which was originally published in Monster Beauties: A Trans Poetics Archive Anthology.
Lonny Saleeby writes and lives in coastal Maine.
Wake Up Body
You wake up to a body
hungry, hurting, calling out
a sharpness a throbbing a dull cold
You wake up to having a body
Sometimes in the morning
sometimes not for days
You’re startled to regard your own blood
pooling your sheets, a stark reminder
You are animal
You must take care
Drink water, face the sun, hear
your own voice cry or sing out loud
Do you remember what a brilliant wonder you were
wiggling toes and fingers and feet all moving
at your own command
Do you remember your body, here to lend you
one magnificent chance
living this life
– Lonny Saleeby
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Wake Up Body,” copyright 2025 by Lonny Saleeby, was published in Monster Beauties: A Trans Poetics Archive Anthology. It appears by permission of the author.
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