I was slim, like a slender elm in a bureaucrat’s forest
ready for harvest,
stomach as flat as a French model’s,
ready for adulation,
a size zero like a precious actress.
I was a banquet,
a bounty, the jutted ribs a toy &
collar bone a yoke, Picasso cheek bones
angular, the best disappearance I knew.
They tell you,
you just can’t leave like that,
but you can, if you’re not afraid to seek
secrets of a dead ocean,
and not afraid to be ravenous,
like sea grass without a sea.
Originally published in Night Music Journal
I carry my body, a tornado
I'm the greedy torch who carries you, my body. I twist you, ribs & spine & scapula, shins & breasts, over grassy flail. Your mink nipples & velvet belly slick, your flagrant inventory of self. I carry you through naked sky, light nickels & your hair melts cake over my ragged arms. When you sink, I counterweight you, I pull you not afraid into the hail, your naked- ness storms—the narwhals & fingernails & chin & slide deliciously in my gust. I carry you, my body ripe & felting. There is no way in hell we didn’t scathe a path of sharp lights scraped across the sky.
The Parrots
Uncle, a rare meningioma chewed your spine, a vicious chance, & burned you, a high school star athlete to wheelchair. Paraplegia. I (your youngest niece) didn’t know how to talk about it.
What words arced my lips? I’m afraid you might die. I’m afraid to talk about your wheelchair, which is another you. It’s a lieto say, I have hope. Wheels on either side of you, a metal chariot, took my speech.
It carried your illness. Thing is, you defined wheelchair panache. You beat the TABs (the temporarily able bodied as you called everyone else) at billiards, snaking your sleek contraption
around the table like it was a trendy add-on, while the standing stumbled with their sticky feet & awkward drinks in one hand. I visited you in your two-bedroom place with the flattened carpet
& hospital bed, Amazon parrots squawking in converted window cages. The great parrots, with wrenching beaks that could tear wood, fluttered green, red, raucous. They spoke for me in endless
overlapping chatter & grey tongues, screamed my pain. I saw you weren’t the caged one. Your lopsided smile, pulled up at the corner, could not be bolted down or metalled. The wheelchair that was
you but not, you rode like you designed it just for kicks & built the damn thing yourself. It was me in the cage, my fear for you, my fear of what was happening or might happen, & I was grateful
for the yelling of parrots, as they culled the chaos inside me, they were my wheelchair, you could say, so I could find my way to move forward, just as you had yours.
Originally published in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art
I want my body to be pixels of galaxy
I want feathers for cells. I want my body to inhabit itself as unfettered.
But my body is a skin press, a suitcase of static filaments from hair to hips.
My body protects itself, overlaid flesh carabiners hook & catch, edges roll & stay.
I want to split this tight flesh corset one seam at a time. Peel it outward, red muscled and intestined, once destined to be held in.
My body is a mollusk afraid to fissure its shell, to let its restraints
fall. I want to float the squid interior, remove its equations of containment, let my body be wild
like a surge of starlings, arrowed, spiraled. Let my body be a magnet of a million parts,
whorled, & not obliged to any.
Lynn Finger’s poetry has appeared in 8Poems, Perhappened, Twin Pies, Wrongdoing Mag, Book of Matches, Drunk Monkeys and Not Deer Magazine. Lynn is an editor at Harpy Hybrid Review and works with "Free Time: Building Community for Incarcerated Writers," through the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. Here is more info: Follow Lynn on Twitter @sweetfirefly2 and @lynmichf on Instagram.