Title: in rainfall

Creator: Grace Zoerner

Category: Body

Creator Commentary:

This poem revolutionizes what it means to be fragile. I was forced to confront my own bodily and emotional fragility during my freshman year of college, when I dealt with all the normal college freshman stuff in addition to (a) physically recovering from knee surgery after being involved in a car accident the summer prior and (b) dealing with all the lovely emotional turmoil that accompanied that accident and its impact on my life months later. Through all of this, I learned something very important: that the distinguishing factor between fragility and frailty is tenacity, because a person who feels brittle (whether in spirit or in physique) will only truly break if they are too frightened by being vulnerable to push beyond weakness, to push through towards strength. Fragility, in its autonomy and tenacity, is not frail; it is revolutionary. This poem is about the dynamic between strength/fragility in both the mind and the body, but I put it under this category because it’s a lesson I had to learn from my corporeal self.

Submission:

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Creator Bio:

Grace is a freshman Creative Writing major with a minor in Psychology. As an aspiring author, she loves to read novels, poetry, plays and creative nonfiction — and she knows most of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem Renascence by heart. She’s also passionate about theater, dance, and coffee. In her adulthood, she wants to travel the world and write.