she left a shell for me to sleep in. i did a baby’s crawl inside. i loved the future in which nothing was taken. once, we belonged to the earth and our return will be long-awaited. my body aches. i am reminded the ways i’ve stretched thin. i anthropomorphize the flowers and pick them intentionally. bird watching is a form of suicide prevention. my body is a discovered science experiment, an undertested variable. field notes: i react negatively to touch now. i am not magnetic. i’m a mayfly with blood tests. the difference between the male and female woodpecker is a streak of red. my fingers can remember the notes of a piano before my brain. the body operates from a part of the mind we unknowingly have little access to. the body is a mythology. we spend all our life’s resources on learning and unlearning. the mythopoetic suggests no semblance of reality. here then, i make everything up; the body is a solar system visited by aliens and stitched by stars. i’m patch hunting on new earth with my faceless lover and our baby calf dancing twig-legged beside us in a sunflower dress. details toss with the florets of a dandelion. are wishes edible too? sent in the wind? reproduced by apomixis, named from lion’s teeth? the body is my multiplying evermore resting on the back of a turtle we cannot disprove.
C. heyne (any/all) is a genderqueer poet from Sunrise, Florida, and resides in Hoboken, NJ. A recent graduate of Illinois State University, C has been featured in Muse/A, DreamPOP, The Oakland Review, Gyroscope Review, Best Emerging Poets of Illinois, and Euphemism.