Diptych of Body as Illness

Poetry by Kristin George Bagdanov

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Kristin George Bagdanov is an MFA student in poetry at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. New and forthcoming poems can be found in 32 Poems, Redivider, CutBank Literary Magazine, and Ruminate. Her chapbook We Are Mostly Water was published last spring by Finishing Line Press as part of the New Women’s Voices series. More of her work can be found at www.kristingeorgebagdanov.com.

This poem is part of a larger poetry project that explores the relationship between self and body and other. Some of the questions that led to the creation of this poem are: What is a body? How does it contain, orient, and interpret the world?—other bodies, other matter? And what is the self? Isn’t it also material, inextricably linked to the body? Is it the body? Can the concept be separate from the material? If not, why does there always seem to be a tension between the two? I am interested in exploring this tension, in testing it in hopes of finding some sort of boundary. I want to probe the threshold areas that one uses to define “one’s self”—thresholds between self and other—specifically the body, the divine, and the “nature” that one’s self considers outside its limits, control, and consciousness.