My Body Begins Under a Full Moon | Essay by Tara Shea Burke

"She was small. She was beautiful: a spectacle. Until she was filled with me."

Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you would like your work to be considered for future issues.

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Jordan Tierney, Blue Jay Reliquary, Late 21st Century Jones Falls Settlement, tree root with natural stone inclusions, vintage flatware chest, beads, broken china & crystal & furniture parts & hardware all found in stream, collage, velvet, paint; 15 x 22 x 4 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

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Issue 22’s Featured Writer Tara Shea Burke is a queer poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and the author of Animal Like Any Other. She teaches writing and creative practices at VCU and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. She's been a literary editor and contest judge, has served as a board member and grants coordinator, is trained in trauma-informed, accessible movement, and workshop facilitation, and hustled in restaurants for 20 years. Her work has been published widely, most recently in Southern Humanities Review and Queer Nature, edited by Michael Walsh and Autumn House Press.

Tara Shea Burke, Dusk, Winter, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

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Tara’s essay is accompanied by two of her photographs. Here’s an excerpt:

My body begins under a full moon. I begin by filling my mother’s body. My mother’s body was home. She was small. She was beautiful: a spectacle. Until she was filled with me.

My body begins in my father’s heart. My father’s heart was stressed. Taxed. My father’s body avoided taxation. It was hunted because he avoided everything. He left places, lived in basements. My father’s heart was enlarged—the pressure in his blood, high. He hurt and ignored hurt. My father’s heart was a hard-working heart. It thumped under his rib bones, between the thick fascia in his chest and his chest held it. 

My body begins in fullness. I am full already, under the full moon, held outside of my full mother’s body in the hands of my father—his heart, full. September 24th, 1983. 11:20 a.m. Front Royal, Virginia. Chart me…

Read My Body Begins Under a Full Moon.

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