Field Notes on Becoming Yourself

pluck fallopian
foxgloves from your diseased roots

egg trek            cardiac harvest

wear insects as rings,
arthropod legs caging each digit

around your neck, trilobites

rusty toenails
scratch off achilles blisters

stack blocks with your beet
stained gums

pick suckers from your armpits
swallow them whole:
deer ticks,          your aphrodisiac

palpitate your inner
embryo with your lidded palms

hush the textile secrets of your eyes’ backsides
chlorophyll impregnations, a souvenir

sway to the comfrey
swallowing bee hum

translating itchy veins
a lost                    now          Found treasure

opal smoke out your lapel
felt cuckoo clock, your urn

titanium gears for joints
revolving as you try on mannerisms

morphed curiosity
you, a novelty

embroidered bullet hole
cello beak,
stitched shut
bred

blurred crevice
chalk screech
transluscent caesarian
shave ‘em, prep ‘em
cul de sac bones
disinfectant illusion
economic residue
involuntary forceps
materialized stirrups
earthy sear
moist pucker
intravenous arm-twisting
depreciating sequel

 

molding the pulse

our reveals aren’t pink and blue

it’s a human we cry and we cry
because we can          we can

mold the pulse of
self-consuming self

hands intertwined snakes
camouflaged in rose folds
a pieced together glow

our ribs and joints, little midnight snacks
we keep everybody else well fed

our malleable opens and closes
trespass their vapor borders
into the throbbing

pores of the property
of us: we, their astringent

we are characters who survive
who don’t have to come out
our past, a parody ailment

we cultivate waves of human buzz
our selves are not legalities

we are less birds and more bees

we don’t wear black to the cemetery

no longer an other, but an us
thrusting headfirst
with hunger.

 

 

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Savannah Slone is a queer writer who is completing her M.F.A. in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in or will soon appear in Heavy Feather Review, FIVE:2:ONE, The Airgonaut, Ghost City Press, decomP magazinE, TERSE. Journal, and elsewhere.

You may keep up with her on any or all of these social media:

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