Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 125 Corey Hickner-Johnson The Color Run On the path to North Liberty, it was gray and was sallow as I pounded 400s on the hills. My body was lethargic, unwilling at first, and then, after I felt sick, I ran even harder. I was claiming some last home for my heart out there—there in those anemic, gray prairie fields—some thing I did not know but could make for myself, some masterpiece no one would ever see but that I could store up in my ribs to pulse against the world. After weeks of intellectual plodding, letters saying “no,” scraps of thoughts that find me in the night while I’m dreaming about concrete, I wanted a run that would nearly break me. I wanted to feel my body—to feel my own sovereignty, if that is even a thing left in this world. With lactic acid oozing in my mouth, a wrench in my belly, I broke through on the second interval. I knew then on the path, that my viscera had colors, and if they could be seen, I would be like an oil-painted smear to the cars on the highway. I knew that if my banging heart were to explode, it would be red, and my liver kind of blue, and if my guts were to spill out my mouth to the ground, they would be green and maybe yellow. My bones would be white, forged in a melancholy I caught in the womb, my muscles purple and brown. My sweat not a color, but maybe a shimmer. My back and neck like chrome. I wanted to see myself, a tiny fire on that prairie like the Monet with the little sun on the gray, gray water. And when I knew I was enough alive, when I felt my belly start to swirl, my brain start to blink, I turned around after the little hill to make more intervals, and to feel more like a sun. When I got back home, I felt sleepy again, but not faded, because I had made something. And I wrapped it all up in my skin, feeling its warmth and sickness, color and pain, and I went back to the gray dream, knowing there are colors beneath my surface....