Victoria Garcia

Victoria Garcia is a poet and creative writer from New England. Her poem “Internal Mechanism of the Otherworldly” was published in Libre. Her poetry pursues the wilds of the unknown, and seeks to break the limits of reality by uncovering the marriage and division of the tangible and intangible.

Easy read of the poem in the images above:

no more run-on anthems of anatomy

(CW: physical illness)

the invalid is infinite despite all great pauses in the spine.

when i was young i did standing work

the kind where no matter how long one girl runs

the other must be wrapped in ascensions.

damage wheels around the future

with long hallways & no one to carry

the divinity of movements

like resistance in the alcove of two

lonely shoulder blades

ask the muscles if

the way in which they flip over

is the river—& therefore ruinous—

it is not a weakness but a war

that travels like light paths

& sits in the illuminations.

what results

is how the body must travel

between the present moment.

always this light over that.

the body like the pit of the olive

being picked out—

ripple that puts the i down

like a belt at the end of the day.

no more waists

but their absence

like perfumed anatomy

rises up into the illness

& is no more.

funerals are all part of the body

(CW: death/mortality in association to invisible illness and medicine)

illness a roundabout

way of the body saying no

to how many shards

of glass it can hold.

the mind keeps

looking for places where pain is flesh,

so illness can throb with precise

isolation. what is invisible

doesn’t really have a direction,

so the pain becomes

an impossible rendering

of glass inside the immune system. but it bunches

like a dress

where the ruching

doesn’t exactly fit

the pattern of the bloodstream,

where the body is overtaken

by misfirings

and all the medical research is bottomless

because it takes too many cadavers

to see the mistakes,

so i don’t really trust anyone

with how a wound slides open

and digs deeper into the black haunt,

so i return parts of myself,

assign them a string,

and convince the wind to rub against

them as if they were failed kites.

illness generates mirrors

because nothing looks back the same

but is a parallel slab of self that runs

straight but in the opposite direction,

so how much of the body is

a compilation

of moments, memories, desires,

that i sit flush up against?

i don’t want to say that’s morbid, but—

i am morbid only

because the treatment of me is morbid.

pain is the only solid thing

that keeps up its circular inferno

until

the wound is part of the glass

& glass is the beginning–

i like to think the action of glass

is as much a part of the wound

as a noun is a response to a verb.

illness is the movement of glass

and the body moves with slow terror

towards the rip

and the body gets so shaken up

by the entrance

the antigens strike

the immune system

and what results is whole parts of the body

turning up broken

not to mention, where the body falls

apart is exactly where

mortality slides in and flesh

is no longer a problem.

my thinking is circular,

but there is nothing more synonymous

with perfection than to keep returning.

to do the work of the circle,

to have no other mode

of thinking than to survive

the repetition until i am whole.

where is the wrong in that?

do i find it sad

what is infinite will have no other life?

no, like life, i think it only continues

because it must, or until continuing is

no longer a solution.

if anyone understood the role of words are visceral

(CW: violent imagery/mentions of death. not self harm but imagined violence on the self.)

you call me a nutcase. harmful

but thin as a stray crow

that falls pitiful on the roadkill.

to make up for it, you string my large intestine to a row of beads,

so the blood falls lonely, encumbered by hardened grass.

why is it i feel the sadness in my neck

like it could break my spine

into snow?

why do i take it seriously? wouldn’t i be better

off as a lawn chair, or the carcass of the lion

taken over as a hive?

honeyed–useful enough

to inhabit new swarms.

it seems my will

only resurrects as long as it takes

to cross the road

into the mournful redemption

that could be mine

if my head didn’t fill

with bread and the silence of crows

picking me off as a sullen prophecy.