Arisa White’s Yoga places memory inside the body. A childhood collision with a car survives through sensation, posture, breath, smell, movement, and the speaker’s careful attention to what the body still carries. The poem moves between an injured eight-year-old self and an adult practicing yoga, allowing healing to appear as an ongoing negotiation with velocity, fear, family memory, and the body’s remarkable capacity to repair itself.
Yoga
The poem begins with physical impact and preserves its details with unusual vividness. Oranges, traffic, an injured leg, the liver, streetlights, wheels, and a mother’s face enter the remembered scene. These images keep the past materially present. Memory arrives through objects and bodily states, so the accident belongs to the speaker’s sensory life as strongly as it belongs to chronology.
The title places that memory beside a disciplined practice of attention. Yoga asks the practitioner to notice breath, alignment, tension, balance, and the limits of movement. White uses that setting to bring an old injury into conscious relation with the present body. The poem treats posture as a form of listening. Each movement has the potential to awaken something stored in muscle, tissue, reflex, or fear.
The body as memory
Yoga presents memory through recollection, protective habits, sudden alarm, hesitation, and the sensations attached to earlier pain. Alison Strub’s poetry of medicine and the vulnerable body offers a neighboring approach to bodily knowledge shaped by diagnosis, history, treatment, and sensation. White gives layered memory a language grounded in bodily fact.
This approach allows trauma to appear through repetition and sensation. A cluster of physical images reopens the accident with the force of an entire narrative. The remembered face of the speaker’s mother, the gurney, the road, and the damaged body form a pattern that can be activated by present movement.
The result is a poem in which time folds through the body. Childhood remains accessible because the adult body contains traces of what happened. Healing becomes temporal as well as physical: the present self meets the earlier self through breath and movement.
Healing as bodily intelligence
White gives the body an active role in recovery. Tissue repairs itself. The liver heals. Breath changes the pace of movement. The yoga instructor asks the body to rest and release. These processes suggest a form of intelligence that operates below deliberate thought. The speaker witnesses the body doing work that consciousness can support and partly guide.
This emphasis gives healing complexity. Repair and memory continue together. A healed organ can coexist with fear; a functioning leg can still carry the emotional history of injury. The poem allows restoration and vulnerability to remain present together. Progress is measured through attention to what the body can do, what it resists, and what it gradually permits.
Mother, road, and sound
Family memory enters through the speaker’s mother, whose face appears within the remembered medical scene. That face gives the accident an interpersonal dimension. Injury changes the child’s body and also changes the people who witness, fear, and care for that child. Sylvia Chan’s work with family memory and bodily witness offers another contemporary route into the way intimate history becomes a form of literary testimony.
Roads carry another layer of memory. Travel, traffic, wheels, and state lines create a moving geography around the speaker. A car radio crosses into another frequency, and tires acquire a flute-like sound as they slow. White turns transportation into an acoustic field. Motion can trigger fear, while sound can transform that motion into something more attentive and strange.
The shift in radio frequency also offers an image for memory itself. A signal can weaken, change, return, or become available through a different band. The past behaves similarly in the poem. Its presence changes in intensity as the speaker moves through experience.
Breath and release
Breath gives the poem a counterforce to impact. The accident is sudden, violent, and externally imposed. Yogic breathing is deliberate, rhythmic, and internally observed. Through breath, the speaker can slow experience enough to notice the body’s reactions. Release becomes possible through this sustained attention.
The instructor’s language of letting go carries emotional weight because the poem has shown how much the body has reason to hold. Fear once served a protective function. Memory preserves the knowledge of danger. Release therefore requires discernment. The speaker must decide which forms of vigilance still serve the present body and which have become burdens.
Usefulness and continuation
The poem’s closing concern with future usefulness gives healing an ethical dimension. The speaker considers what the body can still offer, how memory can be carried, and what release might make possible. Usefulness here includes continued movement, relationship, work, attention, and the ability to inhabit the body with greater freedom.
White’s broader poetic practice often engages identity, family, history, and the ways personal experience becomes communal language. Her books include Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, and Who’s Your Daddy. Across this body of work, lyric intensity frequently meets questions of inheritance, kinship, self-making, and survival.
Trauma and lyric form
Yoga gains its power from the way lyric form can hold several times at once. The injured child, the adult practitioner, the mother at the scene, the moving car, and the instructor’s present voice occupy one field of attention. Hosannah Asuncion’s poetry of loss and partial memory provides another perspective on how fragments and sensory traces can carry difficult experience across time.
White keeps the poem grounded in concrete experience. Oranges, organs, roads, wheels, lights, breath, and sound give the meditation physical weight. The body remains the place where memory, danger, repair, and hope meet. By the end, release feels like a physical practice and a way of reimagining what continued life can contain.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for other writers exploring memory, family, embodiment, identity, and healing.