If you listen closely, you can hear gravity
parting its thighs. My own name a metronome
beneath the tongue. This story goes: once I let a boy
cut my stomach open with an earring
and slip inside like a sleeping bag. Once I lured a rabbit
with my palm & bit its head clean off.
For months, I’ve tried to birth my own ocean,
a place where they call murder
a miracle of nature. Because somewhere
beneath these floorboards lives
the body of my body: the one I sobbed into
tumbleweed: the one where my prayers took refuge
until it broke from the inside out. At night, I look down
from jagged rooftops and watch the windows
close their eyes. It is like a ghost remembering
bone— how it feels to swallow & be swallowed
all at once, a burning honeycomb spitting bees,
each stinger lit to resemble a wound. How I want to eat
every beam of light that passes through me,
like some fire-sucking god, dismantling every blade
too sharp to live inside of us—
“Self-Portrait as Postmortem” by Helli Fang is a Poetry Finalist in Columbia Journal’s 2019 Spring Contest, judged by Tommy Pico.
Photocredit: shando via Creative Commons
