Body Electric
The street begins to tremble before we do.
Music leaks from windows, from lungs, from the cracks in the pavement.
Someone beats a drum until the air itself shakes apart.
Someone else throws glitter into the sky, and for a moment it looks like prayer.
Everything touches everything else.
I lose my name in the crowd.
It slides from me, dissolving into bass and heat.
Hands lift me into rhythm,
a thousand small acts of surrender
stitched together into something sacred.
The light hits every surface differently.
Sequins, faces, bottle glass, bare shoulders.
Each reflection calls the next to life.
I remember that joy is a kind of rebellion,
a decision to keep moving when the world says stop.
We dance until there is no one left to watch,
only the shared pulse that keeps us upright.
I do not want to return to silence.
I want to live inside this thunder,
to keep every heartbeat that is not my own.
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her poetry explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, and being human. Her work appears in One Art, Eunoia Review, and Berlin Literary Review. More at veronicatuckerwrites.com and Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.
