The Poetics of Soft Belly

As I feel my way into another calendar year (I’m not going to get into the colonial nature of the Gregorian calendar...), I’ve been sitting with the prayer for a soft belly. I’ve been wondering how the world might be different if we all were able to find a softness in our core and let that guide our relations, our actions, our imaginations... What kind of world would it be if we were collectively guided to act in accordance with all that softens us at our core, allowing our breath to be met with expansion and melting possibility? What would we do if we followed the lead of a soft belly, not figuratively, but somatically, physiologically, actually?

A soft belly signals a nervous system no longer organized around threat—breath drops low and wide, digestion resumes its quiet intelligence, and the vagus nerve carries the message that presence is survivable. The body loosens its vigilance and remembers that safety can be felt, not performed.

The poetics of a soft belly is complex, perplexing, and directly animal. The poetics of soft belly is not metaphor, but a somatic-political technology and one that reorganizes labor, refusal, kinship, and safety at the level of the nervous system.

Over the winter solstice season of 2025, I’ve come into a new relationship with grace. Through communion, marronage, whimsy, and a little confusion, I’ve felt in my body the unwinding of perfectionism, an undoing of over-performance, a permission for spaciousness in places I did not realize were contracted.

I learned more deeply about toxic stress and the quick escalation from exhaustion to illness that mounts Black women and re-affirmed my “why”. Toxic stress settles in the belly and abdominal cavity as a chronic holding—tightened viscera, interrupted digestion, impacting all systems of the body. It becomes a braced core trained to anticipate demand before it arrives. Over time, the belly becomes a site of containment rather than nourishment, rejecting digestion of all matter(s). It re-affirmed the sacred efforts of repairing and rehabilitating our systems. In sitting with this, a wisdom came through:

the labor of refusal: the liberatory practice of not contorting into prescribed shapes.

To hold boundaries that refuse contortion into white supremacist shapes of legibility, respectability, success, or value is a tender labor of maintaining authenticity, dignity, self-hood, well-being, and integrity. I have witnessed the sacred and difficult labor of this refusal.

I want to delve more deeply into the logics of refusal, and speculate on meaning, or reverse engineer the meaning-making apparatus and somatic markers that fuel that kind of labor. Refusal arrives first as sensation, not stance—a quiet drop in the belly, a slowing of breath, a clarity that does not rush to justify itself. Before it becomes action, refusal feels like enoughness settling in the body, making space where urgency once lived.

What are the physiological markers of refusal and how are they distinct from resistance? Are they? What historical and emergent narratives of refusal instruct our modern understanding of labor and how might we redefine labor - from compliance to creation? There is often a slippage between refusal and resistance, as though they are interchangeable postures toward power. They are not. The distinction matters -not as semantics, but as physiology, orientation, and consequence.

If we allow, refusal is a sovereign embodiment of parasympathetic activation rooted in choice, boundary, and decisiveness. It is not a reaction to, but a relationship with, the logics of bracing—an activation of an embodied otherwise. The labor of refusal is one of rooting into a sense of safety emergent from a nervous system attuned to authentic presence and truth. It is non-performative. Attentive. Aligned. Attached to clarity rather than spectacle.

Resistance, by contrast, is reactive. It is adrenalized and opposition-rooted, requiring a bracing against in order to deny relationally. Resistance pushes, digs in, and performs the optics of the unwilling while remaining embedded in the dynamics of force, flattening, and tension. It is tethered to stress activation and to a meaning-making apparatus shaped by fear of and anger toward a disconnected Other.

The depth of that reorientation has trickled in all directions within my relations and I can feel it move like truth. To bear witness to a seemingly simple thought become a position, a devotion, a discipline in real time is a holy affirmation.

To invite our grief to pour, not bottle, is an offering of grace. A need beyond need. A want beyond wanting.

The poetics of soft belly is a poetics of possibility. This ontological reframe holds the necessity for a world built on the logics of permission. It allows us to want for nothing, undoes the mechanisms of trauma, and heals the meaning-making apparatus of the nervous system so it includes access to the frequencies of abundance and satiation.

The poetics of a soft belly contests the ever-present threat of starvation and undermines the assumed sanity of bracing. It unarms and disarms the optics of preparedness from the intensities of shock and control in order to center and sanctify digestion. It undoes the aesthetics of “firm” (as in “tight abs “and “flat stomach”) as virtuous and instead allows them to signal unsafety and a preparedness to malform to the subjugation of power. The phenomenon and optics of a soft belly, resituated as a sacred embodiment of belonging and safety, creates and re-affirms the aesthetic intelligence and dense ancient wisdom of the Black Female Body.

It redefines kinship as a softening, a ripening of the center that communicates connection and the inheritance of core belonging. It has me thinking of La Vaughn Belle and her work that speaks to the belly button as the 1st marking of belonging, of kinship as inscription on a belly - the physiological engravements that register the aesthetics of both kin and the softening of belly - the mother-core as stretched softness: a none-tightened core (though tightly stretched embodiment).

The politics of soft belly unbraces labor, unbraces connection and reaching, unbraces the praying. It demands contraction as choice which allows us to know and engage with our strength in clarity and placement.

The soft belly makes possible the water. It returns us to the music of oceans, re-infantalizes without denigration, re-members us as fluid, liquid, impossibly unfrozen, unstuck, unbroken. The poetics of soft belly redefine the politics of feminine by situating softness not as dispossession but as a collective response to kinships rooted in the safety of communal care. It divests from the binary of soft/hard or strong/weak and instead engages with a politics of safety that conflates and collapses these edges. A politics of soft belly argues for a softness as in belly-up-ness to be a reflection of truth, safety, and sovereignty made possible through the labor of kin and care making.

It reforms our image of the Black femme body from the exposed back of capital to the soft belly of kinship. It fully fleshes the skin and articulates the echoes of care. Enables laughter and wailing. Engages beauty and tenderness with fortitude and wholeness, boundary and consent.

In obvious and mysterious ways, the poetics of soft belly is a result/consequence/process and product of the labor of refusal. By in centering the sanctity of a soft belly, the understanding and revealing of refusal give physiologic language to liberation. In the knowing, sensing, feeling, and having of soft belly - we are then instructed when the labor demanded of us is of acceptance or refusal. Rehabilitating the meaning-making apparatus and decoupling threat from connection is how we begin to notice, access, choose, and engage with the lifeway and politics of soft belly as Black Feminist Praxis.

tse