At twenty-one I thought my body was

just a room I lived in, my mind the real

me where love ran clear as a beck

and birds flew over the horizon, dark

stars in a sunset sky. Then I got sick

and lost horses and softball and patience

with my own keening that sounds like

the high bell stuck mid-ring inside

my ears. I have stood on the moors

where Charlotte imagined Jane Eyre

fleeing the ruins of her paradise

and asked the wind to take me, this

once, away and through the bracken

and heather and even the stinging

nettles because my breath couldn’t

carry me far or fast enough. Shame

a small seed uncurling when

the white-haired Yorkshire woman

stopped to share a kind word, her

face creased from smiling, and then

turned to climb towards a hilltop

with a view I wouldn’t see. Lucky,

I will come back and back again

with a man born of these stone-strewn

paths. Unlucky, my fingers and toes

stiffen like old roots. One day

I may lay this body down in a sacred

stone circle and hope to wake, if I wake

at all, with my blood singing a new

wild song as strong as the cold North Sea.

Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. Her books include Love Songs from the End of the World and Castaway. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, Orion, and elsewhere. Co-founder of Sweet, she teaches online workshops. Find her at katherineriegel.com.