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2022 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize

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Skeleton Gender Reveal Party (Nonbinary)

by Rose Zinnia

 

Hey I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness To keep all our bad ideas, keep all our hope It's here in the smallest bones, the feet & the inner ear It's such an enormous thing to walk & to listen — John K. Samson i dream w my dead grandmother who walked in the same skeleton as me the same carrot fingers she’d bowl three hundreds or play piano sonatas or drown herself in alcoholic waterfalls w the same phalanges in her bread loaf feet that drunkenly sleepwalked her down the basement stairs into death whose metatarsals held me (a tiny rose) as i coo’d & curled & siphoned her bright red nails pulling for more touch more touch more touch more

my skeleton woke up & put on no clothes my skeleton genital-less grinding to the beat my skeleton crumpled in the street of my mind by the biker in the cemetery who said come over here…just come… & began stroking his pubis glaring at me thru his shades on his harley my skeleton / my skeleton my skeleton assigned male by the ohio department of health my skeleton being measured & taxonomized at the hospital seconds after being born my skeleton made legible taxable commodified on balloons in the delivery room congratulations it’s a skeleton

when i am bones in dirt slowly becoming fertilizer food (again) the earth won’t gender me & everyone will eat me (out) breathe me then

love i want to love yr skelly learn its mountains & ridges & isthmuses liqq every w/hole its emptiness makes push crevice into crevice rub femur against femur bony violin ossein orchestra as a teenager i’d ask friends to place their elbow (which is yes an estuary) into my eye socket & rub it around for a bit i could hear their laughing vibrating thru my eye my eye an ear their elbow an ear love when we walk this planet’s mystery misery miracle i imagine yr metatarsals hugging themselves as they caress the earth holding u up in communion w our listening w our desire love yr face pressed on my cheek my cranium conducting our voices earlessly hearing in this way the skull an ear the foot an ear everything ear-ing to listen to the soil which is to say each other love when we place our ears to the earth our skeletons soar above the human we storks or clouds or the light limning them our skeletons w wings arms akimbo taking in light like a pupil before burning up in a pulsar which is an ear an estuary too which is a kind of returning home i brush my teeth made of supernovae i liqq yr starteeth yr stars bite my earth yr earth fuqqs my ear/th yr earth / my earth love /love yr face pressed on my cheek my cranium conducting our voices earlessly hearing in this way the skull an ear the foot an ear everything ear-ing to listen to the soil which is to say each other love when we place our ears to the earth our skeletons soar above the human we storks or clouds or the light limning them our skeletons w wings arms akimbo taking in light like a pupil before burning up in a pulsar which is an ear an estuary too which is a kind of returning home i brush my teeth made of supernovae i liqq yr starteeth yr stars bite my earth yr earth fuqqs my ear/th yr earth / my earth love /all of we marooned light turned to bone i don’t want to blow each other to smithereens or stones i know we are shiny dwellers jubilant humus as the sky bursts w angels dropping dead in droves heart-stroked i hope when the sun explodes everything we’ve been will craft a new ear th but before that i hope we can recognize our ear/th/s here our listening which is a touching which is a lifting out of doom’s enclosure



 

 



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