by Rebecca Bell-Gurwitz

Body as ultimate repression, the fence where neighbors stare from outside in, bringing laughter with their bellies. I bear the flag of my body, marked by sultry scars, deposits of fat, years I’ve been given. My stomach hurts from laughter; when it heaves I remember how I felt when small in the kitchen of my conscious where mother and I used to eat fruit with juice dribbling wet down our faces and bracing our hands on the table, we laughed. Fenced in, I think of my body as the tree that cannot get enough sunlight so it stoops over and keeps growing.

Rebecca Bell-Gurwitz is an aspiring psychologist and writer based in Queens, NY. She writes succinct and sprawling stories with a surrealist slant, prose that reads like poetry and poetry with fictional narratives. Currently she is working on a “longer piece” masquerading as a novel about—what else—a dysfunctional family.