PHOTOPOEM
I
You send me posts
about David Wojnarowicz
and I say yes.
You ask me to fuck you
and I say no,
or I don’t. The flashing eye of God
is looking through
its spectacles. Under every inch of my skin–
fluorescent lights,
plasticine meats, the photograph of
a dead man.
II
In the tender light of afternoon,
I shudder toward a feeling–
grain of a gelatin print,
bruise against bone.
On the inside of my arm,
THE FEELING
OF THE BODY IN SPACE. I
peel myself.
The bitter, shiny spiral
left behind–
skin of Marsyas. Skin
of an orange.
III
This summer,
everywhere, doors
close, pronouns
close, like shutters,
lenses on a waterfront at night,
and I am dramatic,
driving the car
with teeth bared, breast
bared. I fear
for the people I love,
which is not enough. My body
frays. Frays. Strays too close
to the hot melon
of the sun.
IV
The enchantment
of flat chested men I have wanted
to be, photographers, pissed-
off dykes, portrait
of the pussy of the artist
as a young man.
To confirm
I want anything:
a statement,
foreclosure, flash
of a shutter.
V
And yet,
on the beach at night,
you take my photograph,
and I am blurred–furious distance
between me
and the perceptible.
My body, there,
and there, and there,
at the edge of the expanse.
transitive
And if sometimes, I go over a hillside in late fall, & think of you all,
wild, shimmering & changed, like paper dipped in water,
this is by design. Everyone here is here & so beautiful I could die:
opossum hides at the roots of a tree, gravel in my shoes, holes
bored in an orange. The whole narrative converges on this
one room, wearing down the soft edges of the afternoon, of our bodies. The president
talks about us & we are raised blisters on the ankle of the nation, opening
the wrong windows to the sun–hot, electric, transitive.
We’re always going to be here, says E. Light & dust move across the hillside like the day.
If a is b and b is c, then a is c: the mechanical eye of god, someone telling me
about being six months on HRT, the nation cutting into our skin.
If I could I would, I say, lying through my teeth,
my country, right above my heart, like a knot of water rights,
blacktop, buzzing powerlines, lust.
Sadie Forkner (they/them) writes poems & prose. They are a graduate of the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands and a winner of the Jean Burden Prize in Poetry. They are currently working on poems and fiction about landscape & gender.
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