Have you ever wanted a new body?
Have you ever lifted a camera to catch
a single-sided fable of your muscle mass?
Have you ever woken drenched in your own sick,
felt like a sinking freighter, a thin blade, a hollow bone?
Do you ever wish your skin wide as a night
to run straight through, clawed as a red moon
teething in the sky? Ever held your hand in cool water
and craved that easy passage? that still wave
and shifting stasis? Have you ever leaned your cheek
against birch bark and dreamt yourself smooth paper
growing upward, out, a deck of cards flitting into place?
Have you considered how many wings could sprout
from your joints if they spoke your crude language?
Have you stood jaw-deep in the ocean
and considered your cells a reunion of metal stars
tumbling in a glass? When you close your eyes,
what do you see? Do you imagine you are a room,
a respite for laundry wrapped in sweet musk,
carpeted and smelling of garlic, burnt sugar?
Whose body will you wear this morning?
A cow’s lung? a shoreline braided
with kelp? a fever? a ringing at dawn?
a steam engine plummeting into the dark?
2014
Regular
Contemporary
2023
Body & Body Image
Nature
Technology
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Asyndeton
the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”