If I had to place my finger on the point of beginning, it would land on the black Marley floor of a dance studio. I was laying on the ground, shoulder blades hackled against stiff surface, feet splayed like the day I was born, fighting off the urge to laugh or flee, and hoping my stomach wouldn’t squirm audibly in protest of my horizontal state. My head was being held in the hands of a stranger. He was kneeling behind me with a quiet omnipresence while across the room were twenty more just like us, paired up and touching so peculiarly you’d think it was couples yoga. But it was anatomy class. Tristan, the professor, grounded us in this; we were there to learn about the body.
So I tried to let my skull be a skull. The stranger shifted the weight of it all from one hand to the other, over and over and always gently, as if my head was water in a bowl. I had not realized, until that moment, what it was to carry such a weight, and so a simple act became revelatory relief. He then pressed the ten small-ended bones of his fingertips into the place where neck begins and pulled at this calcified ridge, the bottom line of my skull acting a stone grip to his efforts to stretch my body long-wise. It was a new feeling, this strenuous type of comfort. Like a meditation, trying to mitigate resistance to the now. Usually, the hands of a man carry meaning, harm or sex or friendship or roughness or family or strength or disappointment, but I had to imagine that these didn’t. I had to whittle them back to hands. After the practice was completed, I became the hands, my partner taking the role of heavy head, and it was easy to follow the instructions. Tristan’s voice floated over us as we, the bodies, complied, breathing out our hesitations. How did we get to this place? Where in a room full of people I felt as safe and comfortable as if I were completely alone.
It was this day of relief that I wrote this collection’s titular poem, “Body Experiment,” and then a few days later “Sometimes I forget you’re on top of me.” I think, through some opaque verse, I was trying to say that I had found an answer.
These poems and the environment that produced them became the foundation of my thesis. I set out to write in defiance of the abstract binaries and categories culturally imposed upon our bodies by the hierarchical structures we inhabit and the cult-like legacy of western philosophical tradition. I wanted to throw the mind-body divide out the window and exploit its derivatives for content. I wanted to deal with shame through a lack of it, and to pile embarrassment with positive associations, since no one has ever been embarrassed in their silently abiding. I wanted to heed—instinct, whim, all that is guttural. I wanted a utopia, I realized, a world just out of reach, a world in which the man who calls out to me from across the street is simply saying hello. Or maybe he is even saying, Audrey, you can lay down now, I know it’s all been terribly hard lately. In this imagining, I would rest on his stoop awhile, quiet and alright, momentarily relieved. I would be safe. Wouldn’t everyone?
I took all this with me to Prague, where I lived out the turning of a season. The city offered me something my home country couldn’t, which is the living memory of being unbound. Many Czechs had experienced revolution in their lifetime and embodied the symbolic, political, and physical shift from oppression to freedom. I thought, too, about the unfreedom, fixated on it, exploited its derivatives. There was one book in particular that had, and has, a dogged way with me—Pavlina Morganova’s A Walk Through Prague; Actions, Performances, Happenings 1949–1989, a map of small resistance brightened by analog documentation: old photos, letters, type-written text. The book catalogs the Czech action art movement that bloomed from the paved-over decades of Soviet censorship—a movement derived from a desire for free expression and constrained by limited access, where the only way to create safely and freely was to create unnoticed. These artists, without audience or exhibit, were performing body experiments of their own.
I was wildly happy. Beatifically lonely. I wrote not a word of this collection there. The construction of these poems came limping in the aftermath as I pieced together all that I had gathered. Leading up to my final year of school, I spent three months in Prague, visited Rome and Athens, Krakow, Berlin, Vienna, and then, with the Phillips Fellowship, set out on a backpacking trip through Chile and Peru, ending up red-cheeked in Mexico City. I had never been so liminal, and I spent a lot of time with one question: what am I in this place?
The collection itself travels from a vague home-place, flat-landed and pale, to Cusco, Montreal, Rome, northern Greece, lingering awhile in Prague. Before I’d written a word of it, I knew that poetry is the impossible translation. It is incessantly deprecating. To write it is to accept defeat and still love it. So, as I was writing this collection over the past two years, I was the experiment. Perhaps a failed one. But I danced a lot. I made things up. I was kind to strangers. I was kind to friends. I was sorry for my mistakes, for when I hurt other people. I tried to be better, more expansive, more. I tried—here goes the traces of it.