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
entirely
un/recognizable
I see / un/being skittering
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.