Franny Choi

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Franny Choi is the author of several books, including, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has also received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the Poetry Foundation’s podcast VS (it’s pronounced “verses”—get it?) alongside Danez Smith and is currently an Arthur Levitt, Jr. Artist-in-Residence at Williams College. Source

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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?

Published:

2014

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Body & Body Image

Nature

Technology

Literary Devices:

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”