un/body

written after Die Verwandlung

I one morning from un/settling dreams

wake, the small yellow ditch

in my breast deep

enough to make

my finger falter.

I trace it at night

after shedding

every layer I can.

Jagged nails catching

on the puckered

edges forming an un/bidden question

what would my chest feel

like if that incision had kept

going, after the tumor came

out? Fatty tissue un/furling

from my ribs.

I let my fingers sink into

that murk to parse the monstrous

geography of the Un/geziefer

a negated / body of dead verbs

and dirty adjectives pressing

themselves into dreamshaped

sentences of shrill

clicking black tusks

cradle the swell of my chest,

horned tips sliding beneath

the flesh and cleaving.

Un/shelling a body

myself beneath my feet / spindly feelers

trembling beneath this skin

to un/earth it/my/them/ourself.

Elliott Voorhees is a trans agender poet. Their work has been featured in The Coraddi and Sienna Solstice. For the past year, they were a poet-in-residence with the Lloyd International Honors College's Leonard Pubantz Artist Residency Program. Starting this fall, they will be a part of the MFA poetry cohort at California College of the Arts.