Author’s note: I remember the moment when I learned about fascia. My cousin, a physical therapy assistant, was telling me about his work as we sat at the kitchen table. How was it possible that I’d never heard, never conceived of this body system, which the Cleveland Clinic calls “a sheath of stringy connective tissue that surrounds every part of your body”? As I researched fascia, I discovered that articles on the topic used vocabulary that I recognized from my years of knitting. The collision between these two interests sparked the poem.
We all wear a sweater
under the skin, a knitted buffer
customed ordered
to the exact proportions
of the heart, brain,
lungs. Yours, I mean,
and mine. Hidden
by the epidermis,
or by scales, feathers, hides,
we bear the secret identity
of all muscled creatures—
our insides wrapped
by a web of yarn, continuous
and spider-fine. It nestles
against the structure of bone,
dampens the spark of nerves,
a shadow self that bears a knot
for every hurt, a record of our story
that we will never see.
Laura Shovan is a novelist, educator, and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Her chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone won the inaugural Harriss Poetry Prize from Baltimore’s CityLit Press. She wrote the award-winning children’s novels The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, Takedown, and A Place at the Table (co-written with Saadia Faruqi). She teaches for such programs as Boyds Mills, Whale Rock Writing Workshops, Writing & Illustrating for Young Readers, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and mentors teens in the Navigating the Margins writing program. Laura founded and co-hosts Wilde Readings, a literary reading and open mic series in Columbia, Maryland.
