Shelly Baer

Photographed by Darryl Strawser

Prime

I believe in my flesh and its appetites. Gazing, hearing, touching are divine, and each part of me is divine.

A miracle I am inside and out, and I make sacred whatever I touch or am touched from.

The scent of these armpits aroma released as prayer; this broken body finer than desecrated temples, and all the faiths.

You ask of being in my prime, kind sir

I no longer wish my crooked places could be made straight. I stare in the mirror now and its reflections. Seeing, listening, feeling are miracles and each part of me is a miracle.

I no longer want to inhabit someone else’s body. I inhale and reclaim what was lost when I was a child. I release the anger in my lower belly and genitals and taste, suck and scream.

What is prime? I no longer subscribe to an age, number or idea

The soft, small hands inflicted with disease caress her devotee; the round butt more perfect than geometry, the young, and all the able-bodied women. I exhale and sit with my body. I believe in my pleasures. I lovingly offer this body to him. We stare deep, everything is illuminated. We surrender and merge beyond our individual selves. I believe in desegregation of my body. No more blockages, spirit and mind healed. I now believe in feeling, touching and claiming my beautiful, heavenly, delicious, flawed, temporary home, my body.

I am a woman. In her prime. She was in me all along.