When she is desperate
to be well,
she tries on
that floral dress
with the silver threads
woven through.
-Sarah Piper, “Dressing Down”
There really is not a better way to tell people, “I'm well again!” then to put on a very nice dress. I first tried on the green floral ankle-length beauty before my chemo-related stomach problems started. It felt foreign on my body, but it fit. Then, by the time the wedding rolled around, my white counts were low and my abdomen distended. I wasn't sure I was going to be there and then I was, but the dress that once fit was “scratchy and irritable” from the start, crossing over my grumpy belly without the requisite forgiveness that the sweatpants I'd worn for months afforded.
There is relief in getting undressed at the end of pretending. My body in my underwear is familiar, and safe, and real. My port bulging from my skin, my stomach bulging out, like a pregnancy I'll never have. And there really is no hairstyle that doesn't pretend the way a loose ponytail doesn't pretend, but I don't have any hair anymore, so I can't employ an elastic like I used to. (I miss it.)
In “Dressing Down” (Poetry, Intima, Spring/Summer 2025), Sarah Piper offers us a look into what lengths we go to when we are desperate to be well, and what exactly it feels like to return back to the home of yourself, just as you are.
I wonder, as I read the poem, if there is a specific event that the speaker is dressing up for, like a wedding. Or maybe a specific person they are dressing up for to convince—as I so often want to—that their body is well again.
And I wonder, if wellness is not a nice dress, or even an underwear-clad self returning to the home of oneself, if wellness instead, indeed, could be a ”well (of possibility, a sky)”? If wellness is not “putting on airs,” as my Southern grandmother would say, but an internal feeling of trust, regardless of what our bodies do or do not do? We don't control what happens to our bodies, but we do control how we respond. How we adorn. And how we move through the world.
Piper offers a gift in this poem. A moment of return. Of relief. May we return, relieved, again and again, and again.
Liddy Grantland
Liddy Grantland (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and care worker from South Carolina. She shared time as a direct support professional and team leader at L’Arche, Greater Washington, D.C.: an intentional community of Medicaid-funded group homes for folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is in the process of a Master of Social Work program and, as of January 2025, lives with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Her work can be found in her book, Flesh and Bones: Learning to Love This Body, and on OurBodiesOurselves.substack.com.
She is author of “Reverse Landing Strip” (Field Notes, Intima, Spring/Summer 2025).