by Emily Lowe

It is called “Underbelly”

Inspired by Aaron Wilcox’s Sculpture “Underbelly”

1. It is a coiled spinal cord rolled and twisted and churned.

2. It is mangled train tracks painted white.

3. It is thick sets of clothespins strung on a wire.

4. No, it is all broken bones. It makes me think of a story my friend told me when she hiked through redwood titans—a ghost forest in fog. Out of the mist, a man emerged dragging the clean, white rib of a whale.

5. It is a ball of knotted tires.

6. It is a wadded-up piece of trash: one large, discarded mistake.

7. It is made of zip ties, those stiff plastic threads that can’t loosen. As a child I tested zip ties on my wrists, tightening them until my skin puckered into a valley, the watching the color wither away from each finger.

8. It is called Underbelly which means the soft underside.
       a. I think hidden.
       b. I think dark spaces.
       c. I think family flashlight hide-and-seek during childhood power outages and how once, after an hour of searching the house, my father was still missing. Gone, I thought. He’s gone, gone, gone. But then his laughter shook the darkness above. I shined my light onto my father’s belly, all 200 pounds of him perched on the fridge like a cat. He looked down at me, his smile white and wide as a rib.

9. It is a secret tucked into itself: still, sleeping.

10. It is a brain.
       a. A dead brain; drained of its fleshy pink.
       b. A choked brain.
       c. A father’s brain—stroke-stricken.

11. It is a ceramic piece. Pottery, like the kind I used to paint at birthday parties: a father wolf and his cub, a papa giraffe, and his calf. I hated how slowly the kiln cooked, that I could not immediately take my fathers home with me.
       a. I could never be a potter.
             i. I could never stand work as slow as grief.

12. It is called Underbelly which means a vulnerable or weak part.
      a. It is what we hide away when others get too close.
            i. An ex-lover’s missing tooth.
            ii. Another’s removed testicle.
      b. It is that painful part that cannot heal.
            i. My father’s gray matter turned ghost forest.
            ii. My mother’s lost husband, a love cut short.
            iii. My blood, thick with the clotting gene—an inheritance.

13. It is the photo the doctors showed my mother: a brain split in two. They circled the right half and said All of this is gone.