Flesh Pastoral

Gelatin silver print, 12” x 20”

See the ridgeline of stretch marks and glacial valley of the throat. Rolls that conjure rolling hills, and tufts of hair—the gentleness of meadows. My own body is a vessel wreathed in shame. Little collection of petty failures. There’s something so enticing about seeing another’s body, stretched out as a feast or field. Focus, soft and shallow as a breath, which blurs distance into distance, countless miles lost from ribs to hips. It’s easy to imagine that you could build a home here, put animals to pasture on this chest, shelter behind the stomach’s trailing hair like a windbreak of trees. The portrait’s name is all it takes to set the imagination to work building fences, painting barns. All it takes to fill this scene with life. I want to love my body like a landscape. Somewhere I could imagine a future. Somewhere I could make a home.

torrin a. greathouse is an award-winning transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and is a current PhD student at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), winner of a 2025 Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Prize in Poetry, and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Website | Instagram | Twitter/X / Bluesky

"Flesh Pastoral" by torrin a. greathouse