And Then
I took off my shame like a dress made of light. Like a dress made of the self- spun cocoon. I was not beautiful. It was not about beauty. Beneath my shame, the body was a raw red thing, untrained in acceptance. But the air was delicate and cool as a mother blowing gently on a burn. I had lived so long in the fabric, I thought it my skin. I had forgotten how new anyone forgiven can become. first published in Missouri Review, forthcoming in If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025)
There is another poem by Matthew Nienow, “Repeat After Me,” that begins:
It is good to be strange & if you are lucky you will not linger in the mirror but find yourself in song
Lovely, isn’t it? How a poet can exist in conversation with their own poems? How one poem can talk to another, like entering — one night — into a dream you had the previous night. Like returning to a house you built entirely in your mind, opening the door, and finding you left the window open in a room you realized you once set foot in, long ago.
To be surprised by yourself; to find yourself talking to yourself as if you were your own old friend — this, too, is poetry.
And so I am thinking of that line: It is good to be strange. A perfect sentiment, echoed in today’s poem, when Nienow writes:
I was not beautiful. It was not about beauty.
I spent the latter half of the week reading through Nienow’s work, and I spent the latter half of the week lingering on this work. I think this is in part because so much of Nienow’s work deals with the kind of grace that today’s poem offers. It’s there in his older poems, such as “Bad Year Anthem,” which ends:
All work, no pay makes a body bray. Though he may bray — Though he may bray and bray, forgive him the bit.
And it’s there, too, in poems such as today’s. Or in “What Luck,” which begins with an acknowledgment of the grace offered toward the poem’s speaker:
I lived. Lived again. Wrecked, hungover. Swerved in the dark from river back to bunk and never hit a tree.
Lately, I have had a line from Marilynne Robinson singing in my head. I think I have quoted it before, but I will quote it again. It’s from Gilead. It reads:
Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
I think that I have been thinking of this idea of Robinson’s because it’s nearing the end of the school year, and I am tired, and students are tired, and other people are tired. Everyone is tired. And yet, at the end of every school year — without fail — there is this mad dash to get work done, to pass, to ace the standardized test, to graduate. It’s a mad dash, in other words, to put back on the dress of shame that Nienow’s speaker takes off in today’s poem. To re-cloak oneself in the guise of respectability or performance or achievement. To, as they say, get your shit together. As if getting your shit together means remembering that the world asks you to be defined by so many metrics, and then hurrying back towards those definitions.
I’m struck, in moments such as these, by how carceral our language is within almost any system that attempts to educate or provide or grow or change any person within this giant thing we call society within this even more giant thing we call the world. I’m struck by how often I overhear adults talking about whether or not a student deserves to pass. Or how often I overhear a student talking about how their grade — in a class, on a test — defines some semblance of who they are. I’m struck, in other words, by the way we teach children — and also come to rely on ourselves — far less graceful ways to define themselves as they move through the world. Each day. Each year. Another measure, another achievement metric, another stitch sewn on that dress of shame. And I’m struck by all of that because I love Robinson’s claim that part of the point of grace is that we don’t deserve it.
Today’s poem reminds me of that fact, too. And I think it is a fact that we do not deserve grace. I think it is a fact in the same way that something almost magical can be a fact, which is also the way the world kind of is, in that there is the fact of what you can explain and then there are the many facts of what you cannot explain, and those facts — as in, simply the existence of mystery — are the most wonderful facts of all.
Nienow writes:
Beneath my shame, the body was a raw red thing, untrained in acceptance.
That notion that a body can be “untrained in acceptance” but trained in so much else — isn’t that part of the strange, twisted, guiding logic of the world? That we can — and often do — educate ourselves to be defined in every way other than, well, exactly who and how we are? That we often seek definition — and, in turn, acceptance — through what is outside of ourselves? When we do take off that dress of shame, as Nienow writes, we are left, so often, with something we haven’t even tried to accept. Or something that we find hard to accept, because we have become so used to measures of acceptance so out of tune with ourselves. We become like Nienow’s speaker in today’s poem:
I had lived so long in the fabric, I thought it my skin.
As such, I think there is a beautiful, grace-filled idea at work in the final lines of today’s poem:
I had forgotten how new anyone forgiven can become.
When I first read today’s poem, the choice of the word new here felt jarring, almost. I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought how could this old body be new? Maybe I thought that forgiveness was a kind of acceptance of the old. But, as I read and re-read this poem, I began to cherish that word. New. I think I have come to associate newness more with time than attention, if that makes sense. As if there is a period of time when something is new, and then it is new no longer. But that’s wrong, I think. Today’s poem illustrates a kind of return to a body that has been neglected by the person who lives in it, a body that has been unaccepted. It is, by time’s standards, the same body, sure. It isn’t new. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The length of time we spend with something allows it to feel new to us when we finally see it as what it truly is. That newness is a kind of surprise. It feels new, in other words, to accept an aging, unaccepted thing. It feels new to accept something that has been hidden for so long. It feels new because it is new, despite its age. Grace, then, makes us new to ourselves. It is, like so many wonderful things, a surprise.
And if grace has the potential and possibility to make us new to ourselves, then I think, too, that it must have the possibility to make us new to each other, and to the world.
In his afterword to this poem, Nienow writes:
This work of becoming never ends…My wife has offered, rather unbelievably, the rare and remarkable chance to be new, despite certain eras of our nearly twenty-year history together.
I find this beautiful and touching and tender. I find it a remarkable testament to the capacity for people to find this sense of newness within what can feel so locked in by time, or judgment. In this sense, life feels more like the work of becoming than the work of determining.
But it’s funny, too — how we often use the word becoming to direct us toward a version of ourselves that, perhaps, isn’t quite ourselves. We say we want to become something or someone. We say we want to become this when we are older. We point outward and then spend a life reaching toward that point outside of ourselves. I think this is because we place what we deserve outside of ourselves, rather than within ourselves. And then we make ourselves work and work until we get what we think we deserve, and it is only through the work we make ourselves do that we think we earn the possibility of deserving anything. If Robinson is right, this might be because it is hard to extend ourselves grace, even and especially when we find ourselves undeserving of it, which is — perhaps especially — when it matters most that we offer grace to ourselves at all. I want to learn how to say something like I want to become more of myself.
This work — of extending yourself grace — takes a whole life. I don’t think it ever ends. The other week, I read at an event celebrating 15 years of Longreads — a publication I am grateful has published me and supported my work. As I was figuring out what to read, I reflected on the first piece I ever published with them, “Running Dysmorphic,” which detailed my struggle with body dysmorphia as I moved through the various environments of competitive running. That piece ended with this paragraph:
What I mean to say is: My better is not your better. I want to say it to myself in the mirror, to the face that looks back at me and says you’re not fat … you’re just … I’m working on it. So much of life is about what you give yourself permission to do or don’t do, and how that act of self-permission leads to joy. This requires the discernment to know what joy is, or how it feels, and in what ways it is true. Both of these acts — permission and discernment — take a lifetime to learn. And the choice to learn requires its own lifetime. It goes on, this work. It endures.
I wrote that five years ago, and it’s still true. The work goes on. It does endure. The active, endless work of extending yourself grace, learning how to forgive, leaning into joy, and becoming, over and over again, more of yourself. I haven’t quite figured it out. I’m still learning. And life has pushed me to learn the fact of this forever-unknowing, this forever-grace-giving, over and over again, just when I thought that maybe, just maybe, I’d figured something out.
In a moment from Marlen Haushofer’s novel, The Wall, which tells the story of a woman dealing with the aftermath of a mysterious and terrifying invisible wall cutting through the Alps, leaving her to fend for herself and care for a growing, though tiny, family of animals, she writes:
For the first time in my life I was calm, not content or happy, but calm. It had something to do with the stars and the fact that I suddenly knew they were real, but why that was so I couldn’t explain. It just was. It was as if a big hand had stopped the clock in my head.
I love that image — the hand stopping the clock in one’s head. The moment the stars become suddenly real. I love the image because it feels like an apt response to a potential retort to all I feel a little uneasy about as I write this today — the extrinsic definitions, the achievement complex. As in, it feels like an apt response to someone who might say what would we do without such definitions. What would we do? I don’t think we know yet. We haven’t stopped the clocks in our heads.
Another one of Matthew Nienow’s poems, “For What It’s Worth,” begins:
I’d repeat my sons exactly as they are, even the one with the now blue hair still asleep at the foot of my bed. I’d repeat the night I met my wife and even the middle years of purgatorial sorrow.
I think we have a choice, often, to lean back into ourselves and our lives rather than away from such things. And I think that this is a choice that grace makes possible. As the school year ends, and as I see all the ways in which our world forces definition on people as part of their education, I want to think about what it might mean to look at myself and look at others in ways that allow ourselves to feel new. Not new as in different, but new as in seen, finally, for the first time, for who we are. Which is to say: all of who we are. Which is to say: unhidden behind the shame caused by being untrained in acceptance, and the shame caused by being defined by achievement. I don’t want my first question, when looking at someone, to be what do you deserve. Why would I even ask that — even and especially now, when I know that the point of grace — which is the work of making ourselves new to ourselves — has nothing to do with who deserves it. There is a life we can make new, each day, by seeing the wholeness of someone rather than their inadequacy. This newness we can provide and also feel — it’s a lot like love.
Some notes:
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
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Gorgeous reading as always. I didn't know Matthew's work so thank you for sharing xo