I Found My Living Body on Display	
After the Whitehorse Hill Woman of Britain’s southwestern moors, c. 1700 BCE.

                         There are, besides gifts of the head, also those of the heart.
	                                                                                                                —Carl Jung

Body dysmorphic disorder, diagnostic code DSM-5 300.7 (F45. 22)
Bulimia nervosa, diagnostic code DSM-5 307.51 (F50. 2)

My body was lost to me but I found its fragments on display at the Plymouth Museum in Devon, England. I found things I’d known but forgotten, things that were familiar millennia before they were strange, before estrangement from the body, the human. One can have an obsession with the body while still wishing to flee it, to be severed from it, to punish it for its trespasses, its inconveniences, its vulnerability to harm and slight. Over and over I hollowed my stomach to empty by regret. Digit by digit, limb by limb I cut and didn’t notice blood draining from the heart. I had become a severed head at my own hand, home for monstrous thoughts to inbreed and feast upon fruits of their labor. From the display case that day, the hill woman crooned a feral bone-song into my squandered body; clay beads clacked a rhythm against shale. I began to feel my body, and not as too large, too round, too square or too much; the copper pin unclasped to show its alloyed belly. My body awakened to itself, nostril by nostril, sole by sole. By tongue, by belly, by gut, parts braided into one like wefts of her cow hair armband. Feel kin with twig and leaf and stone, she sang; feel your skin against moss and feather and loam, she sang; feel your animal body with talon and fur and bone, she sang. The flint tool sparked a lust for sensory abandon — I would bite! scratch! laugh! fart! shout! stomp! dance! stink! howl! And so I re-became. I see myself held forever within the pelt of a bear, laid atop a blanket of purple moor grass. I see daughters after me take sustenance and succor from the marrow of my bone-songs; nourishment and nurture from beetroot, fiddlehead and golden chanterelle; seek solace between root and branch of the Fortingall yew. Whitehorse Hill Woman, through the fragments of your body I re-membered mine into the warp and whorl of time. Your heart was not there on display, but I felt it, and with it my own beating. 
		                Thunder in the chest 
		                threatening to burst a ribcage
		                with its blooming

                         

1. In addition to Whitehorse Hill Woman’s cremated remains were grave goods in the Dartmoor cist burial, including: a flint tool; a brown bear pelt fastened with copper alloy pin, turned wood discs for earlobe or lip expansion; a braided cow hair armband with tin studs; 200+ beads of amber, shale, clay and tin; a basket; and fragments of textile and leather. ↩︎

Kel Beer lives near the tallgrass prairies of central Iowa, on the ancestral land of the Báxoje, Sauk, and Fox peoples. She previously taught cultural anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Eternal Haunted Summer and Anthropology and Humanism.

A Song for Kel

.