I wake up unable to remember what my hands felt like when they could fold into soft shells; they are crispy as autumn branches, dried into curls brown as molasses. My back gnarls into spirals of muscle, clenched against the server station fridge, opulent seasonal cakes and back stock of soy and almond milk suddenly looming, headstones for the weekend doubles and clopens I pulled without hesitation.

I spend the next morning in bed until I can't justify it to myself anymore, air conditioner humming, filling July humidity seeping in behind cheap cotton curtains.

I am really afraid of dying, which is why I spend so much time thinking about my body, how to carry it around, lined with regret and brittle muscle, edging bottom, wanting to just bruise and be done with it.

I keep trying to dissipate, but it is harder than it looks—dissolving. I don't remember what I used to do: driving the speed limit on an eastern NC highway, my front tire dipping into a ditch just enough to render my metal skeleton immobile, my brain unfogging anew.

Most of this body marked by edges, strong edges, something inside the strongest substance, firm but forgiving. I am filled by this, leaving room for almost nothing else, but I love the tiny, empty part, the echo hiding somewhere inside, pearl in the gnarled shell of my body, its camouflage distinct and almost invisible.

When I tell my therapist I am afraid of being weak, she asks what I am really afraid of and I cannot answer, except to say dependence, reliance, everyone thinking I'm a burden. I unfold my cane in the waiting room, knowing I don't want her to know—not yet, anyway.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JESSE RICE-EVANS is a queer Southern poet and rhetorician based in NYC. Read her work in Heavy Feather Review, Yes Poetry, tenderness yea, and in the chapbooks The Rotting Kind (Ghost City Press) and Soft Switch (Damaged Goods Press), among others. She's a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing at the City College of New York and the Cooper Union.

after Frank Ocean

You kept looking at me like you wanted to touch me
I thought it would be worse: the seams of my body
tearing in secret, an addendum unfiled, unfiltered

The way my body hurts doesn't require anything from you
           means nothing                       needs nothing
is like that long wailing whale sound, 
only from inside me, and sliced into fragments
thinner than a tooth, but just as wary and vibrating at a frequency
you can't touch, spiralling, but too slowly
to even notice, a broken orbit, an okay metaphor
for the stretching and thinning
is rain
is glitter
is rain

Not always pretty, but full of tongues and
girls and whichever slices of me you'd like to see, 
the same crimped guts you've come to expect, 
shaded swirl, something ruined about my face

I wanted to be cornered

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JESSE RICE-EVANS is a queer Southern poet and rhetorician based in NYC. Read her work in Heavy Feather Review, Yes Poetry, tenderness yea, and in the chapbooks The Rotting Kind (Ghost City Press) and Soft Switch (Damaged Goods Press), among others. She's a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing at the City College of New York and the Cooper Union.

I.

Everything smelled like smoke: the black lab, the incense-soaked tapestries, her hands, ice water. She stalked down the long hallway, blood-stained sheets tacked on walls—sniffing for smoke, yanking doorknobs and tearing curtains. She couldn't tell that the smell was her own skin turning to ash, barely holding in the pillars of flame. She dreamed of the house splitting—fissures of fire, tongue wherever teeth are missing.

II.

At nights she is a dog,
in red moons
a dark creature—
some days are longer than
others—

press my legs with your
diamond finger;
a fire lights behind my eyes
and smolders all evening.

As you get older, windows shrink
and the sky
moves closer, but never
close enough to touch.

III.

Across the salt knobs, the winged monster arose and began to eat the decaying matter of the earth—wet leaves, rotted logs oozing with grubs, detritus from the sink trap.

I spit in a coffee can and step around the mess, heels clicking against whorls in the floorboards.

I try to remember when everything began.

The apartment smells of bonfire and herb bloom and long hours of glass sucking heat and sun. I can't find the letter I am looking for—February, promises, a story about a Polish family and a book of essays.

I have a toothache every day now.

I still have a hard time talking about my feelings. My thighs stick to everything. The wings furled inside of me swell if you stand too close, rattle their cage when anyone shouts.

The blood god visits earlier every year and, honey, wolf moon cry doesn't shatter the mirror the way you dreamt it would.

Cobalt ache—silvery pang erupting up spine—cloud of blooded ash pours from splintered plate, frozen, phone mid­-ring, mouth an o of ocean and full moon blues.

IV.

There is gold inside
my thigh, between femur
and shin—I lap,
press on sliver of bone,
ivory, shy before extraction.

There is a science to
walking through windows without you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JESSE RICE-EVANS is a queer Southern poet and rhetorician based in NYC. Read her work in Heavy Feather Review, Yes Poetry, tenderness yea, and in the chapbooks The Rotting Kind (Ghost City Press) and Soft Switch (Damaged Goods Press), among others. She's a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing at the City College of New York and the Cooper Union.