Your body knows things you never could
by Catherine Bai
Not everything needs to be seen by the love of your life. Just because they want to kiss you doesn’t mean they want to peer into your fallopian tube, and look for that one fragile, fading memory. You know the one. I never said you couldn’t show them all the words you’d never say out loud. Say them to your mother, who would’ve loved you anyway. Except you wouldn’t do the same for her. Yeah, I said it. ‘Cause I’m that way too. The leaking yawn of your mouth looks so stupid now, but it was celestial, when you couldn’t imagine that one day, everyone you know will die, and so will everyone you didn’t know, who died anyway. Picture the pomegranate tree, in the underworld. They’re not red but green. I bet you thought of the fruit ripe and heaving, with scars on the skin that someone made when the branch was still an embryo. The dark traffic swimming, in the pale bit of bone.
Catherine Bai is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Prize, appears in Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and is forthcoming in AGNI. Her poetry is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Your body knows things you never could”? I credit Jenny Zhang’s poetry with inspiring me to make my own attempts in the dark. If you read her poem “I keep thinking there is an august” (available online via BOMB), you’ll get an idea of how the words “stupid” and “celestial” ended up in the vocabulary of my piece. I don’t remember much about the genesis of this piece, except that it came out effortlessly (which doesn’t often happen!)—but I watched KPop Demon Hunters days before getting the acceptance email, and when I reread my submission, it gave me some insight into why I ugly-cried through much of the last half-hour of that film.
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Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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